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By Steve Slater
LONDON, Sept 13 (IFR) - Barclays has cut 13,600 net jobs inthe nine months since Jes Staley arrived as chief executive, or10% of its staff, underscoring the bank's stringent focus oncosts.
The cuts have mainly come from attrition and a freeze onhiring imposed by Barclays in September that is still in place,and cuts in its investment bank and continental Europeanoperations.
"As part of our focus on cost, we have now taken headcountdown by some 13,600 people in just nine months, the netreduction," Staley said at a Barclays banking conference forinvestors in New York on Monday.
Barclays confirmed the number and said it includedcontractors, temporary and agency workers.
The bank employed about 138,000 staff at the end of 2015,down 900 from the end of 2014.
Staley said at a conference in March that more than 6,000positions had gone in his first 100 days in charge, marking asharp acceleration in job reductions in the past four years, andhis latest estimate shows the pace of cuts has continued.
Staley, who started in December, cut 1,200 jobs in theinvestment bank in January as he pulled back from Russia, Braziland seven countries in Asia.
Banks are under increasing pressure to cut costs to try toimprove profitability. Most banks are making returns below thecost of capital and revenues are under pressure from weaktrading income and the impact of low interest rates, leavingcosts the main lever executives can pull.
Barclays aims to get its costs to below 60% of income in thelong term. Its cost/income ratio was 70% in the fist half ofthis year.
Staley said he was happy with Barclays' turnaround progress,and said he would not be changing his strategy or the pace ofdelivery following Britain's vote to leave the European Union,although he said the bank could beef up its operations inIreland or elsewhere as a result.
Staley said the bank had "multiple avenues" to change itsstructure due to any Brexit impact.
"These include expanding the scope of our operations of ourIrish subsidiary, local licensee of branch operations in the EU,and the use of third-party access frameworks, like the incomingMiFID II rules," Staley said.
But he said compared to the complexity of setting up itsintermediate holding company in the US this year or separatingits UK retail banking operations by 2019, any changes "would besignificantly less costly, as they are on a much smaller andsimpler scale".
Barclays will also show "significant further progress" onrunning down its non-core assets in the second-half of thisyear, Staley said. He said the non-core unit will be closed bythe end of 2017, when its risk-weighted assets will be reducedto less than £20bn, from £47bn at the end of June.
The bank was making progress on the sale of its Frenchretail business and also continues to steadily reduce itsnon-core derivatives holdings, to add to other recentlycompleted sales, Staley said. (Reporting by Steve Slater)
