Barclays cuts 5,000 jobs, many of them developers
The British bank partly attributes the cuts to AI and reports 12 per cent higher profit in the same quarter.
Barclays is cutting around 5,000 full-time roles by the end of 2026, about 5 per cent of its workforce, roughly 60 per cent of them in support functions. On 22 October finance director Anna Cross explicitly cited fewer developers, because AI makes staff more productive.
What happened
Efficiency programmes at banks have so far mostly hit branches and back-office processing. Here a major bank, on its quarterly call, explicitly names software developers, the very profession that carried digitisation. Around 1,000 roles have already gone; the rest follow in the third and fourth quarters. The cuts come in a solid quarter: pre-tax profit rose 12 per cent to £2.3bn and the bank announced a £500m share buyback. Group chief executive C. S. Venkatakrishnan added a caveat, calling AI "the icing, not the cake". The real work, he said, lies in consistent data, modern infrastructure and aligned processes. In the retail business, technology already has a measurable effect: call-centre calls fell 10 per cent within a year, staff per branch by about 10 per cent. Barclays is pursuing cost savings of more than £2bn for 2026 to 2028.
What follows
Assessment: the case fits the pattern the data show. AI rarely replaces whole departments at once; it lowers demand in functions whose output is easy to measure. At the same time, firms such as JPMorgan and Schwab are building their own AI agents for customers: the same technology creates new products externally and makes roles redundant internally. For banks in the German-speaking region under cost pressure, Barclays provides a template boards can cite for their own programmes. For employees, value shifts: routine code and standard queries lose, data quality, systems understanding and checking AI output gain. Barclays says it will invest £150m in training by 2030 and that 40,000 employees have used its AI learning offer. How many retrainings actually lead to new roles is not documented.
What to watch
- Whether Barclays announces further cuts for 2027 with its annual results in February
- Reactions from the British banking unions Unite and Accord
- Whether German and Swiss banks give similar AI reasons in their quarterly reports
Sources
- Barclays Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript (The Motley Fool)
- City AM: Barclays to axe 5,000 jobs in 2026 after banking on AI savings
- Fast Company: Barclays slashes 5% of workforce
- Sharecast: Barclays Q3 profit misses expectations