HSBC is consulting on HSBC wealth job cuts that could remove up to 70 per cent of its financial advisers and halve the number of management and specialist roles across its UK wealth division, as the bank pushes to reduce costs through artificial intelligence. The move, first reported by the Financial Times, would affect hundreds of relationship managers and financial advisers across the country.
Europe’s biggest lender has not disclosed the total headcount in its wealth operations, but it is estimated to employ up to 35,000 people across the UK. Its wealth balances stand at £134 billion, roughly split equally between its private banking and premier banking businesses.
What HSBC wealth job cuts could mean for advisers
The scale of the potential reductions is steep by any measure. The bank is considering cutting as much as 70 per cent of its financial advisers and as many as half of its management and specialist roles as part of the overhaul. HSBC frames the changes as an evolution of its digital offering rather than a simple headcount reduction.
A spokesperson for HSBC said: ‘HSBC UK is a long-established, leading UK wealth manager and premium banking provider. We’re continuing to evolve to deliver more digitally-enabled products and journeys, to support our best-in-class wealth service and meet the changing needs of our customers.’
The consultation is at an early stage and no final decisions have been announced.
Elhedery’s AI push and the wider banking shift
HSBC’s chief, Georges Elhedery, has been direct with staff about the direction of travel. Speaking at an investor day event in May, he urged colleagues not to resist the bank’s AI ambitions. ‘We all know generative AI will destroy certain jobs and will create new jobs,’ Elhedery said. ‘But my initial mission is: I need 200,000 colleagues with us on this journey, however many will be left at the end of the journey isn’t the problem.’
He told those attending that staff must not be ‘disenfranchised, not anxious, overwhelmed, and resisting the change.’ The remarks position AI adoption as a strategic imperative rather than an operational adjustment.
HSBC is ranked first in the UK and 11th globally on the Evident AI index, which tracks banks’ AI capabilities as a global benchmark. Earlier this year, the bank disclosed a tie-up with Google Cloud aimed at identifying priority projects that could generate $100 million in efficiency gains. In June, it said the initial focus of that roll-out would cover ‘hyper-personalised’ wealth management, financial crime risk management, and AI tools to ‘enhance’ client services.
The bank is far from alone in the sector in pursuing these changes. Standard Chartered revealed plans earlier this year to cut almost 8,000 back-office roles. Its boss, Bill Winters, described as one of the longest-serving FTSE 100 chiefs, pushed back against characterisations of the move as simple ‘cost-cutting,’ arguing Standard Chartered was ‘replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial capital and investment capital we’re putting in.’ Winters later apologised for those comments in a LinkedIn post.
Separately, City AM reported in April that Lloyds had entered a deal with Google to build AI agents, creating a new internal platform that would allow teams across its group to build their own tools and publish them to a central marketplace where other divisions can find and deploy them.
The cluster of announcements across HSBC, Standard Chartered and Lloyds reflects a sector-wide reckoning with what AI-driven efficiency means for traditional service roles, particularly those in client-facing wealth and advisory functions where human relationships have historically been the product.
For HSBC, the immediate question is how the consultation resolves. With £134 billion of wealth balances at stake and hundreds of advisers potentially affected, the outcome will be watched closely across the industry when the process concludes.
