Société Générale announces “around” 900 job cuts “without forced departures”

She promises that the plan will happen “without forced departures”. The Société Générale banking group announced on Monday February 5 the elimination of around 900 positions at its headquarters, or around 5% of its workforce. “The objective is to group and pool certain activities and functions, to eliminate hierarchical layers to streamline decision-making processes” and of “resize some teams”as part of a broader cost reduction policy already announced, the group explained in a press release.

This is the first time that the bank has massively cut positions since the appointment of Slawomir Krupa as general manager in May 2023. The scale of the plan is almost double compared to the information published on January 19 by the Bloomberg agency, which predicted more than 500 positions eliminated.

The company made public, on September 18, a target of 1.7 billion euros in savings by 2026 compared to 2022, during the presentation of its strategic orientations. These were poorly received on the stock market.

According to the newspaper The echoes, which revealed on Saturday the scale of this plan, the central functions of the group, at La Défense, and IT are the main sectors affected by these job cuts. Submitted on Monday for consultation with staff representative bodies, they will be “through internal mobility, activity transitions or voluntary departures”, said Société Générale.