IT roles may rise at Lloyds while other jobs go

Lloyds has announced its latest strategy statement, confirming that the bank is to shed another 9,000 jobs.

The banking group, which is still part-owned by the UK government, stated that it would be seeking to make fresh savings, including a £1 billion cut brought about by shedding another 9,000 jobs out of its 82,000-strong workforce. Alongside this will be 200 branch closures.

These will come on top of the 45,000 posts it has shed since the financial crisis in 2008 that saw the bank bailed out by the government, which has subsequently managed to reduce its stake from 43 per cent to 24 per cent.

Naturally, this has brought an angry response from the unions, with Unite national officer Rob Macgregor commenting: “The wallets of top executives at Lloyds should not be getting fat by forcing low-paid workers on to the dole. 

“If there are compulsory redundancies or customer service suffers then executive pay should be cut.”

However, the bank itself has said there is another rationale for its measures, based on the shift away from banking via branches to online and telephone services.

Explaining this, chief executive António Horta-Osorio remarked: “This is a highly competitive market and customers’ behaviour are changing. Increasingly our customers want to access ours services in many different ways, via branches, via digital or via mobile.”  

Indeed, the bank’s strategy statement noted that it has spent the last three years building up its digital capabilities and will be investing £1 billion more in this over the next three years. 

That may suggest that more banking technology jobs will be available in the near future at Lloyds, even if they are far fewer in number than the thousands shed among branch staff.

Having just turned out to be the weakest UK bank after the publication of European Union stress tests, Lloyds will certainly need to make a success of this particular enterprise.

Corporate governance recruitment at Barclay Simpson