British bank Barclays has confirmed plans to cut 14,000 employees worldwide. 70% of the planned cuts will be in Britain.
The bank had previously said that the new strategy would involve a reduction of 12,000 employees.
One of the goals is to reduce spending cuts of 1.7 billion pounds ($ 2.9 billion) by 2015. First of all reduction will affect units that are engaged in investment projects.
First 7 thousand jobs will be cut by 2016. In total, by 2016 Barclays plans to cut 19 thousand, 10 thousand of them in the United Kingdom.
In these non-core assets include all Barclays retail banking in Europe, estimated at 16 billion pounds (27 billion dollars).
On the obtained money Barclays intends to strengthen its retail banking business in the UK and Africa.
"We will work only in those areas where we have the capacity, scale and competitive advantage." Barclays CEO Antony Jenkins explained the upcoming changes.
The boss of Barclays also said he understands the public's concern about bankers pay but that levels of pay need to be competitive.
He added that he would "not be repeating the situation in which profits are down and bonuses are up", and that the world of investment banking had changed dramatically and size was no longer the main objective.
He explained that new regulation which required the bank to hold more capital meant that some parts of investment banking "didn't always make sense any more".
Barclay‘s investment banking division profit for the first quarter of this year fell by 49%.
Profit from trading currencies (Forex), bonds and commodity prices fell by 41% and accounted in the first quarter of this year for 1.23 billion pounds (more than $ 2 billion).
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