HSBC weighs cuts to up to 70% of UK wealth adviser roles

HSBC is consulting on a restructuring of its UK wealth business that could cut up to 70% of financial adviser roles as the bank pursues cost savings through artificial intelligence.

The proposals would affect hundreds of relationship managers and financial advisers across an operation with £134bn in wealth balances. Management and specialist positions could also be reduced by half, City AM reported.

What happened

The planned changes span HSBC’s UK wealth management operation, rather than a single office or regional team. The bank has not disclosed its total wealth workforce, so the proposed percentages cannot be translated into a confirmed number of job losses.

Its wealth balances are divided roughly equally between private banking and premier banking. Across its wider UK business, HSBC is estimated to employ up to 35,000 people; that figure is not a measure of the workforce affected by the consultation.

The restructuring brings the bank’s drive to lower costs into customer-facing financial advice. The roles identified extend beyond administrative support to advisers, relationship managers and staff with management or specialist responsibilities.

The background

HSBC has already set out plans to apply AI to wealth services through a partnership with Google Cloud announced earlier this year. The arrangement is intended to identify priority projects capable of generating efficiency gains.

In June, the bank identified more personalised wealth management, improved financial crime risk management and tools to support client services as the initial areas for deployment. Those priorities place wealth among the first parts of the business earmarked for the technology.

HSBC ranks first among UK banks and 11th worldwide in the Evident AI index, a benchmark assessing banks’ artificial intelligence capabilities. That ranking measures its AI position, rather than the employment impact of individual projects.

Other large lenders are also changing staffing and technology investment. Standard Chartered announced plans earlier this year to remove almost 8,000 back-office positions, adding to concerns about the employment consequences of AI in financial services.

Lloyds Banking Group agreed a separate arrangement with Google in April to develop AI agents. Its planned internal platform would let teams build tools and publish them in a central marketplace for other divisions to find and use.

What people are saying

HSBC chief executive Georges Elhedery used an investor event in May to urge employees to engage with the bank’s AI plans rather than resist them. He acknowledged that generative AI would eliminate some jobs while creating others.

Elhedery framed his immediate task as bringing 200,000 colleagues into the transition. He did not present the eventual size of the workforce as the overriding concern, instead emphasising the need to avoid staff feeling excluded or overwhelmed by the changes.

HSBC’s spokesperson described the UK business as an established wealth manager and premium banking provider. The bank said it was developing more digitally enabled products and customer processes to support its wealth service and respond to changing customer needs.

At Standard Chartered, chief executive Bill Winters had rejected a straightforward cost-cutting description of its plans. He characterised the shift as replacing some lower-value staff activity with financial and investment capital, before subsequently apologising for those comments.

What happens next

The next stage for HSBC is the consultation over its proposed UK wealth structure. The reported reductions are potential outcomes, not a confirmed tally of departures.

No completion date, implementation timetable or final staffing total was given. The bank’s statement also did not explain how individual customers would be allocated between advisers and digital services under the proposed structure.