Barclays to axe 1,000 jobs as it cuts financial advice
Barclays is set to lay off about 1,000 staff in the UK as the lender cuts the financial advisory staff at its branches, provoking fury from workers' union Unite.
Customers were increasingly buying and managing their investments online, said Barclays. Photo: PA
By Harry Wilson 6:00PM GMT 26 Jan 2011
Rob MacGregor, Unite national officer, said the job cuts should make the bank's managers "hang their heads in shame" as Barclays argued the redundancies were necessary because of changes in "customer behaviour".
The jobs are being culled as Barclays prepares to end its branch-based financial planning service next month, with affected staff entering a consultation period with the bank.
In a statement the bank said: "Barclays has been conducting a review of its financial planning advice over recent months. This review concluded that, given the changes to the retail investment marketplace, it is unlikely that this business would be able to deliver a return that would justify the investment required."
Staff will be offered what a spokesman for the bank said would be a six-month "redeployment programme" to help them find new jobs.
The news came as Barclays Capital, the investment banking arm of the bank, was handed a £1.12m fine by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) for failing to keep clients' money properly separated from the bank's own funds.
Between 2002 and 2009, Barclays was found by the regulator to have failed to have put its customers money into segregated accounts, meaning that at some points as much as £752m of client funds were mixed in with the bank's general funds.
"Barclays Capital committed a serious breach of FSA client money rules by failing to segregate millions of pounds of its clients' money for over eight years. This posed a significant risk and the penalty reflects the amount of client money involved in this breach," said Margaret Cole, managing director of enforcement and financial crime at the FSA.
Last June, JP Morgan was hit with the largest fine in FSA history for the same offence, when the US bank was found to have held as much as £16bn of its clients' funds in accounts mixed with its own money.
The FSA began taking the segregated accounts issue far more seriously in the wake of Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, which led to billions pounds of investors' money becoming locked up in the US investment bank's liquidation, in many cases because the money had not been kept properly separate from the bank's own funds.
financial planning service, barclays capital, investment marketplace, consultation period, client money, harry wilson, customer behaviour, money rules, advisory staff, customers money, retail investment, jp morgan, financial crime, barclays, redeployment, redundancies, workers union, new jobs, 12m, fsa
qtdz
Telegraph.co.uk
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น