There are more employees on the books than a year ago despite yesterday’s raft of announcements. What gives? finews.asia takes a look.
The message from management yesterday was crystal clear. In the investor slides portion of their annual disclosure package, they indicated they were driving strategic change at pace, and accelerating cost transformation.
As part of that, they reduced the number of employees by 4 percent in the last three months of the year while shrinking contractor headcount by 30 percent and consultant numbers by 20 percent.
It sounds impressive - but here’s what they didn’t say. The total number of employees at the end of the year, at 50,480, was still marginally higher, not lower, than it was a year earlier.
Surprisingly High
The cuts mentioned above were just in comparison to the number of personnel in the second and third quarters.
As I commented a year ago, the group number continues to be surprisingly high given the large number of debacles and restructuring the bank has faced in recent years.
According to the time series provided by the bank as part of yesterday’s disclosure, staff levels are 2.6 percent higher than they were in 2020, just before the Archegos and Greensill debacles. They are also 5 percent higher than they were in 2019 and almost 10 percent (!) higher than in 2018.
Business Developments
From the outside, these look like the numbers of a buoyant business experiencing substantial growth, not that of a troubled bank.
But the same is not true for some of the actual businesses, at least where numbers are disclosed. For example, the number of wealth management relationship managers is down 10 percent from a year ago and it remains below the figures for 2020, 2019, and 2018.
Its so-called Swiss bank saw the number of relationship managers rise by 2 percent. Ironically, they are at the exact same number they were in 2018 although they remain slightly below the numbers in 2019 and 2020.
No headcount figures are provided for the investment bank and asset management businesses while the bank has also stopped disclosing figures for outsourced roles, such as the abovementioned consultants and contractors.
Parsing the Difference
The only reasonable explanation for the increase, at least from the point of view of the information that has been disclosed, is that some of the outsourced roles were converted into full-time bank jobs.
finews.asia reached out to Credit Suisse for comment and a spokesperson indicated that the year-on-year headcount figure reflected the fact that some employees who were cut remained on the payroll for up to six months afterward.
Although that may be the case, shareholders, many of whom are a year wiser – and wearier – should still be asking why the constant strategic announcements, restructuring, and supposed job cuts seem to be having such little impact on total staff numbers.
