Barclays is cutting around 5,000 jobs as it pushes artificial intelligence deeper into its operations — roughly 5% of the banking group’s global workforce, with a significant share of the losses expected to fall on back-office staff in India.
The bank said 1,000 posts had already been closed and that a further 4,000 reductions are expected to be complete by the end of this year, the BBC reported. Around 60% of the cuts will fall within support functions, including among developers.
The cost reductions are focused on the UK retail bank, but a number of back-office functions supporting the UK are performed from centres in India, where a significant proportion of the job losses are expected to land. The investment banking division is also affected.
”Icing on the cake, not the cake”
Barclays framed the cuts as the product of an ongoing modernisation plan rather than of AI alone. Group chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan said the reductions followed significant investment in technology to simplify the business.
“AI has an important role to play and may have a more important role to play in the future,” he said. “We will employ the AI at scale. But AI is the icing on the cake not the cake. Because you need to do the infrastructure build to get the benefits of AI.”
The bank is reaching the end of a three-year cost-cutting programme centred on its UK retail arm. It also reported £2.3bn in profit for the three months to September — higher than the same period a year earlier, but slightly below forecasts.
Union and analysts push back
Sharon Graham, general secretary of the Unite union, said the company was “using AI as an excuse to discard its loyal and long-suffering workforce.”
“Employers should be focussed on upgrading employees’ skills so that they remain employed as new technology changes the workplace,” she said. “Instead, Barclays is guilty of taking a short-term, kneejerk approach.”
AJ Bell investment analyst Russ Mould called AI-driven cuts “a hot button topic”, but cautioned that banks had not yet made large-scale moves toward introducing the technology and would weigh the implications for security and customer service first. “It will be intriguing to see what other banks say in their results in the coming weeks,” he said.
Will Howlett, financials analyst at Quilter Cheviot, said the cuts illustrated “how significantly AI and automation could reshape the banking industry over the next few years.”
Barclays is not alone: HSBC, Standard Chartered and Danske Bank have all flagged AI-related job cuts this year. Hiru News carried the report for Sri Lankan readers, crediting the BBC.
Not reported
No filing gives a country-by-country breakdown of the cuts, so the number of Indian roles affected is not established. Neither source indicates any effect on Sri Lanka, where Barclays has no retail presence. The BBC notes that not all of the cuts are attributable to AI.