Barclays is reportedly letting go 50 members of its advertising team in London to reduce costs. The Bank, it is reported, will replace them with copywriters hired in India.
By moving its copywriting work to India, the Bank will apparently reduce its expenses by £2bn! The new team in India will have artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help them with their work, which will primarily be to prepare content for its ads and website. It is pertinent to mention here that India already has over 30,000 people working for Barclays, out of offices in Mumbai, New Delhi and so on.
The copywriting team that will be put together in the country is likely to be bigger than the London team, and still the Bank will manage to decrease its overall staffing costs considerably, thanks to labour being cheap in our country.
In December of 2024, Barclays had been heavily criticised for terminating some professionals in a rather brutal manner. The Bank had reportedly laid them off just before the holidays and that too without paying them their bonuses. At the time, the 15 laid-off bankers from New York who were handed their termination letters instead of their bonuses just before Christmas, were said to be going to court against Barclays. They had been rendered jobless at a time when bankers, who already earn very high salaries, expect fat bonuses. For Barclays, cutting bonuses was not something new. It had done so in 2023 too, reducing the bonuses by 43 per cent amidst falling revenues.
