Barclays Plc is dismissing roughly 50 senior dealmakers as part of the banking giant’s annual culling of staffers in its investment bank.
(Bloomberg) — Barclays Plc is dismissing roughly 50 senior dealmakers as part of the banking giant’s annual culling of staffers in its investment bank.
The cuts are part of a plan to trim headcount by about 300 people across the corporate and investment bank, according to people familiar with the matter. That amounts to about 3% of total headcount in the unit, which also includes Barclays’s trading operations.
A spokesman for Barclays declined to comment.
Barclays and its rivals have been contending with a prolonged slump in dealmaking and capital markets activity as corporate chiefs remain on the sidelines amid higher interest rates around the world. For its part, Barclays’s investment banking fees dropped 15% in the second quarter.
Wall Street firms routinely conduct annual cuts based on performance to maintain their competitiveness and adjust businesses to shifting markets.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has been planning to begin its annual cut of underperforming workers. Citigroup Inc. has also dismissed hundreds of people across both investment banking and trading this year, including dozens of staffers last month.
“We always continually modulate and modify that workforce,” Barclays Chief Executive Officer C.S. Venkatakrishnan said in an interview with CNBC last month. “What you see at Barclays is no different than what you see anywhere else.”
The company has been investing the banking division after naming two new global co-heads of the business earlier this year. As part of that, Barclays has also hired more than 30 managing directors and directors for the unit.
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