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Barclays Cuts 5,000 Jobs, Most in Support Roles AI Can Do
Barclays is cutting about 5,000 jobs in 2026, 5% of its staff, and about 60% are in support roles such as software development. AI is taking on more of that work.
Barclays gave one of the clearest numbers yet on what AI means for bank staffing when it reported third-quarter results on October 22. The bank plans to cut about 5,000 jobs this year, roughly 5% of its workforce, Reuters reported. About 1,000 roles have already gone and the remaining 4,000 are to go by the end of December, chief financial officer Anna Cross said. The bank booked a further £201 million of "structural cost actions" in the quarter, part of a plan to save more than £1.1 billion by 2027.
Where the cuts fall is the telling part. About 60% are in support functions, and Cross named developers among them: writing and maintaining software is one of the tasks where AI coding tools have spread fastest inside banks. Reuters described it as one of the clearest signs yet of how AI is letting banks reduce headcount in those roles. Chief executive C.S. Venkatakrishnan was more careful, calling AI "the icing on the cake, not the cake" and saying, according to the BBC, that not all of the cuts are due to the technology. The programme is aimed mainly at the UK retail bank, with the investment bank also affected.
The results themselves were mixed. Quarterly profit was £2.3 billion, higher than a year earlier but below forecasts, because fixed-income trading revenue fell 19% to £1 billion against the £1.3 billion analysts expected; equities revenue, by contrast, rose 47%. The shares fell about 2.5% in early trading. That context matters: a bank under pressure to lift returns has every reason to accelerate cost cuts, and AI gives it both the means and a convenient explanation. The union Unite argued that AI may be serving as a justification for cuts that were planned anyway.
Barclays is not alone. NatWest cut 1,000 staff in the third quarter, bringing its 2026 total to 1,400, and Lloyds set a new £2 billion savings target for 2030, City A.M. reported; Morgan Stanley has doubled its estimate of AI-driven job losses in European banking to 400,000. "Banks are increasingly reaching the point where that investment translates into fewer people," said Will Howlett, an analyst at Quilter Cheviot. NatWest's chief executive Paul Thwaite pushed back on the framing, saying AI is "too often framed in quite a narrow way around efficiency".
For bank shareholders the cuts are a margin story; for supervisors they raise a quieter question. When the people who maintained a system are replaced by tools that write and check code, the bank's ability to understand and fix its own software becomes an operational-resilience issue, the kind of dependence on a few tools and providers that the Bank of England and the FCA flagged in their AI survey on October 26.
Sources: Reuters via The Star — Barclays to slash 5,000 jobs in AI-powered cost-cutting drive (Oct 22, 2026); ITV News — Barclays to cut 5,000 jobs this year as AI makes work more efficient (Oct 22, 2026); City A.M. — Barclays and NatWest layoffs signal start of banking's AI job squeeze