More than 60 thousand investment banking jobs lost this year

The main reason for the mass cutbacks is that transaction fee revenues have fallen as the number of financial services transactions, including primary public offerings, has fallen, according to a report in the London business daily.

Based on company reports and its own data, the Financial Times estimates that the world's 20 largest investment banking groups have shed at least 61,905 jobs since the start of the year, eliminating most of the financial services jobs created during the post-cyber-virus hiring spree.

The paper stresses that the figure does not include smaller banks or the limited number of intermittent redundancies, so the actual number of investment banking jobs eliminated this year is even higher.

This year has seen one of the worst waves of job cuts since the 2007-08 global financial crisis, when the same banks shed more than 140,000 jobs.

The biggest layoffs this year were announced by Swiss-based global banking group UBS after its acquisition of former domestic rival Credit Suisse. Credit Suisse had already planned to eliminate 9,000 jobs before the UBS acquisition, but UBS has made even larger cuts in the winding down of the investment banking division of the former competitor it bought.

The Financial Times, meanwhile, stresses in a study on Wednesday that at least half of the layoffs in the global banking sector this year have been carried out by Wall Street's big banks.

Wells Fargo has cut its headcount by 12,000 to 230,000, Citigroup has cut 5,000, Morgan Stanley 4,800, Goldman Sachs 3,200 and JP Morgan Chase 1,000 jobs by 2023.

The biggest US banks have collectively shed at least 30,000 staff since the start of the year, according to a London business daily on Wednesday.

In Hungary, despite the branch closures, more bank employees have been hired, see our earlier article to find out why.

MTI