This Massive Financial Institution Is Now Laying Off 600 People

January 10, 2024

A massive financial institutions is now laying off a whopping 600 people globally in an effort to reallocate resources, the company said.

BlackRock is letting go of about 3% of its global workforce in an effort to reallocate resources during a period of change more rapid “than at any time since [the firm’s] founding.”

The financial institutions, which is headquartered in New York City, is the world’s largest asset manager, with $9.42 trillion in assets as of June 30, 2023.

Blackrock has 70 offices in 30 countries, and clients in 100 countries.

The layoffs affect about 600 employees and were announced Tuesday in a memo to staff, which was published in full by Business Insider.

Affected employees were notified before the mass memo went out.

The departures include “valued friends and colleagues who have made important contributions to the firm” and focus on no single team or region, and are mentioned halfway down in a memo otherwise lauding BlackRock’s strengths and momentum.

“Clients have entrusted BlackRock to manage more assets than any other manager in the world, and it is clear clients want to do even more with us,” CEO Larry Fink and President Rob Kapito wrote.

“Adapting to seize opportunities is what has made BlackRock an industry leader. We enter 2024 with significant momentum.

“As a growth company, it is vital that we continually challenge ourselves and ask how we can best prepare for those opportunities,” they added.

“We must have the best talent in the industry. We need to be agile and efficient in how we serve our clients and how we manage our resources.

We must leverage technology, and we must redeploy people and resources where the client needs are greatest and the opportunities for growth the most promising.”

Despite the layoffs, the firm expects to have “a larger workforce as we continue adding people and building capabilities to support key areas of growth” by year’s end, reports BankingDive.

Also Read: The US Treasury Direct is Now Freezing Customer Accounts

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A massive bank says it’s now running out of branches to close as it has already optimized much of its current network.

JPMorgan Chase is being left with “less and less accretive opportunities to consolidate,” Marianne Lake, co-CEO of JPMorgan’s consumer and community banking unit, said Tuesday at a Goldman Sachs conference.

The update comes after years of regular branch closings by JPMorgan, its big-bank counterparts and various regional banks.

As consumer and commercial customers adopted online banking and financial institutions searched for ways to control expenses in recent years, banks embraced branch consolidation.

A decline in branch visits during the COVID-19 pandemic and a number of major bank mergers in 2021 and 2022 sped up the consolidation process, reports American Banker.

The number of bank branches in the U.S. fell to 79,000 at the end of 2022, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data.

That was down from about 100,000 branch locations in 2009, the last year on record when the total number of branches increased.

But JPMorgan is one of a handful of large banks where the branch count has increased in recent years — ticking up from 4,854 branches in September 2021 to 4,863 in September 2023, according to regulatory filings.

The banking giant plans to keep adding branches at a rate of about 150 per year, Lake said Tuesday.

“Over time, you’ll see our network generally be flat to up, but we’re going to keep adding in areas where we think the opportunity is there to do it,” Lake said.

Despite their short operating histories, the branches added to JPMorgan’s network between 2017 and 2023 have delivered about $85 billion of deposits so far, Lake said Tuesday.

Nevertheless, JPMorgan still has some branch consolidation on the horizon, says American Banker.

Also Read: A Massive US Bank is Now Closing Credit Cards

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