As AI cuts 5,000 Barclays jobs, an English country town is suffering: "The job market is saturated"

Barclays is cutting 5,000 jobs with the help of AI. The British bank said yesterday that the 5,000 jobs are going this year, of which 60% will be in support functions with developers most likely to be targeted. 1,000 jobs have been cut already, says Reuters. 4,000 jobs are being cut between now and year end.

Barclays didn't respond to a request to comment for this article, but on cue it has today promoted Anita Tanna, its former head of equity sales and high touch sales to a new role as chief AI officer. Writing on LinkedIn, Tanna says she is Barclays' first chief AI officer ever, and that she is "excited." She will be "accelerating adoption across the group and focussing on where we can unlock the greatest value."

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Tanna's job is clearly safe, but 70 miles out of London employees are less pumped. At Barclays' Northampton Campus, which has been in operation since the late 1960s and which houses the bank's card and payment services, people tell us they've already been subject to multiple rounds of cuts. Conveniently, perhaps, the Northampton Campus employs 5,000 people.

"I was made redundant in their quest for “automation” and “consistent excellence,”" one analyst who left last month tells us. He says the cuts began at the end of September and were a complete surprise. "Randomly on my day in office, I was called for a meeting and given a choice to stay and be reviewed for competence or leave and accept a pay out. There was no rumours or whispers that it was happening."

After yesterday's news, Barclays people will at least be unsurprised when they too get the call. Bloomberg says that Barclays' CS Venkatakrishnan told employees yesterday that Barclays will try to redeploy talent internally and will invest in their skills. However, the Northampton Campus employs the sorts of data professionals, software engineers, client onboarding professionals, financial crime and investigations specialists and KYC professionals who are most exposed to AI upscaling. Many are at the start of their careers. Redeploying them will be hard.

Almost half of compliance professionals responding to eFinancialCareers recent AI survey that AI is already cutting entry-level jobs. ‘There are already redundancies being made in Financial Crime which will set to continue,’ said one. It's not clear whether they were at Barclays in Northampton.

Those already let go from the Barclays campus say there are no jobs to go to. "The Northampton job market is already very saturated," says the analyst who was let go and who's already applied for 50 jobs without success. "The only jobs that are readily available here are in warehouses."

He tells us he may be forced to look further afield, maybe in London or the North of England. But Northampton is a nice place to be. "We have the countryside but also the benefits of being proximate to developed areas. Northampton is one of the few towns unadulterated by the harsh gentrification or overpopulation a lot of other regions are going through," he says. "It’s diverse, but only diverse enough for everyone to be comfortable with and because everyone is genuinely happy here." 

A pall could be cast on the town if Barclays cuts hard. So far, insiders say the cuts have been "bit by bit" but with 4,000 jobs going before Christmas, Barclays might need to get a move on.

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