Standard Chartered plans to eliminate almost 8,000 jobs by 2030 as the Asia-focused bank shifts to an artificial intelligence-centered strategy, with its chief executive saying the cuts amount to replacing workers with technology rather than simple cost reduction, the Financial Times reported.

Chief executive Bill Winters said the bank would reduce back-office headcount by more than 15 percent, with corporate functions including human resources, risk, and compliance affected across global hubs in Bengaluru, Tianjin, and Warsaw, according to the FT. 

“It’s not cost cutting,” Winters said. “It’s replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial capital and investment capital we’re putting in.” There would be job “reductions in favor of machines, and that will accelerate as we go forward into AI,” he added, according to the newspaper.

The announcements came as Standard Chartered hosted an investor day in Hong Kong, the FT reported. The bank said it had hit its existing cost-savings target of $1.5 billion in annualized savings a year early and laid out new financial targets, including a return on tangible equity above 15 percent in 2028 and above 18 percent in 2030, alongside a plan to raise income per employee by a fifth by 2028 and increase its dividend payout ratio to 30 percent, according to the newspaper.

The planned cuts come amid broader anxiety about AI’s impact on financial services employment. More than 200,000 European banking jobs are at risk over the next five years as lenders adopt AI and shift more operations online, according to a Morgan Stanley forecast cited by the FT.

The news outlet separately reported on Monday that the Big Four consultancies—Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC—are posted more job ads for AI specialists than auditors in 2025. Approximately seven percent the firms’ 2025 job postings in English-speaking countries required AI skills—a sharp rise from the Big Four’s 2022 job postings, when less than two percent of such ads listed AI skills or knowledge as a core requirement, the FT said.