Citigroup To Slash Less Than 1% Of Staff As Part Of Normal Business Planning: Report

The layoffs in Citigroup amount to less than 1 per cent of its 240,000-person workforce and will impact the investment banking division among others

With massive job cuts across sectors, Citigroup Inc is also likely to slash hundreds of jobs in the company impacting the investment banking division among others.

The layoffs amount to less than 1 per cent of Citigroup’s 240,000-person workforce, reported news agency Bloomberg quoting its source. Employees in the operations and technology segment and US mortgage-underwriting arm are also among those to be affected.

The measure is said to be part of Citigroup’s normal business planning, the report quoted its sources as saying. The development comes weeks after rival JPMorgan Chase & Co. slashed hundreds of mortgage employees. Goldman Sachs Group Inc also implemented one of its biggest rounds of job cuts in January as it aimed to cut thousands of jobs across the company.

Citigroup has been upgrading its underlying infrastructure in the technology division in recent years. Chief Executive Officer Jane Fraser has also stressed those investments would ultimately allow the bank to reduce its reliance on manual processes.

“As our investment in transformation and control initiatives mature, we expect to realize efficiency as those programs transition from manually intensive processes to technology-enabled ones,” Fraser said in January, as per the report.

While the firm is facing industrywide slowdown in deals in investment banking. The dearth of activity triggered a 53 per cent drop in revenue from the business last year and analysts are expecting additional declines in the first quarter.

Meanwhile, Alphabet Inc’s self-driving technology unit, Waymo, also sacked around 137 employees, on Wednesday, in its second round of job cuts this year, according to the news agency Reuters. This takes the total cuts for the year to 8 per cent of its workforce.

Waymo has eliminated some engineering roles as part of the cuts to “focus on commercial success,” the company said in a statement. The company has now cut a total of 209 employees this year.

The job cuts at Waymo are part of wider layoffs across the auto and tech industry, including at Rivian Automotive Inc, General Motors Co and Meta Platforms Inc.

Companies, in general, have found that developing fully autonomous vehicles (AVs) that can go everywhere has proven harder and more expensive than expected, and prospects of a profitable robotaxi business likely remain several years away.