Standard Chartered plans to cut 5,000 jobs from its worldwide payroll - or 14 per cent of its 35,000 staff - in the next two years. The group has targeted 6,000 job losses, but new call centres for shared processing will be established, creating 1,000 new jobs, said Mervyn Davies, group executive director for Hong Kong, China and North East Asia.
Another 1,000 staff at Grindlays in India and the Middle East had taken voluntary redundancy packages, he said, leaving net job losses anticipated globally at 4,000.
'Since we have double-digit turnover in Hong Kong as people retire or resign, natural attrition is likely to take care of most of the restructuring needs,' he said. The change had arisen from changes enabled by the Internet and e-banking.
Mr Davies said the locations for the new centralised call centres had yet to be finalised and it was not possible to provide a breakdown of where the biggest job losses might arise. Hong Kong, with 80 branches and 4,700 employees, was the third-biggest employment location for the group (behind Africa, with a workforce of 5,559). The 13,498 in Asia represented just under half of total headcount.