October 22, 2026
Barclays is shrinking its workforce, and support teams are taking the largest share of the cuts. According to Reuters, the bank plans to eliminate roughly 5,000 jobs this year, about 5% of its workforce. CFO Anna Cross said 1,000 positions had already gone, with another 4,000 due by year-end. Reuters' fuller report puts about 60% of the cuts in support functions, including developers. That puts roughly 3,000 of the planned job losses in support teams.
The bank is using technology, including AI, to lower its fixed costs. The announcement came alongside quarterly profit of £2.3 billion, which rose from a year earlier but missed expectations as fixed income trading disappointed. In our view, the appeal for management is straightforward: reducing recurring expenses can support returns when revenue is uneven. Of course, the savings still have to outweigh implementation costs, and the work still has to get done (a smaller payroll does not make an operational problem disappear).
For anyone recruiting, this is a useful reminder to look beyond a bank's total hiring or layoff number. The role and team matter. These figures alone tell us little about the outlook for an M&A analyst seat. Our takeaway is that candidates should understand how technology changes the work inside their target group, including which tasks can be automated and where someone still needs to check the output. Being able to explain an error remains a useful skill, even when the software produced it very confidently.
A few other IB updates before we go. Remember the Piper Sandler/PWP talks from our last post? Reuters reported on October 14 that the firms abandoned all-stock merger discussions after failing to agree on financial and personnel terms. So the talks fell apart before there was an announced deal to terminate (the banking rankings spreadsheet gets a reprieve).
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported on October 19 that Thomas Sheehan, most recently a chair of global corporate and investment banking at BofA, is leaving to become a New York-based strategic advisory partner at PJT after a period of leave. And Natixis CIB announced on October 20 that it agreed to buy Japan's Sangyo Sosei Advisory, a specialist in TMT and infrastructure. The expansion is subject to Japanese regulatory approval, with SSA staff scheduled to join on January 1, 2027.