Hiring and firing at the same time
On Tuesday 6 October, Evident published its annual AI index of 50 large banks and argued that the top-ranked banks are still taking on AI specialists and favouring growth over cuts. On Wednesday, the Financial Times reported, and Reuters followed up, that HSBC plans to remove about half of its UK wealth unit’s managers and specialists and cut its financial advisers by up to around 70%. Our news report covers the announcement. This piece looks at why the two stories arrived together, and why they do not contradict each other. Banks are not choosing between hiring and firing. They are hiring one kind of person and shedding another, at HSBC in different countries, and a single headcount figure can hide the swap.
Strategic Insight: Asking whether AI will cut bank jobs gets the question wrong. The sources below point to a different question: which roles grow, which shrink, and where each sits. HSBC announced the hiring and, by the FT’s account, is planning the cuts, all within three months.
Why the index and the cuts tell one story
What Evident actually measures
Evident’s index is built from public data only. Talent carries 45% of the weighting, and its sub-pillars cover AI development, implementation and model-risk talent alongside training and hiring initiatives. Hiring and AI talent both count towards that pillar, so a bank adding AI engineers gains on the heaviest-weighted part of the score.
Evident’s own wording, as reported by Euronews, already allows for the swap. “Roles are changing, and some are not being backfilled, but the banks at the top of our Index are growing, and growing headcount,” said Alexandra Mousavizadeh, its co-founder and co-CEO. Across the 50 banks, software implementation roles rose 4.3% over the year. HSBC itself slipped from eighth to 11th, outside the top ten.
The pattern in the forecasts
The forecasters reach the same place by another route. In a June column for City AM, Samuel Norman set out the range of predictions for banking jobs. Bloomberg Intelligence expected staff numbers at leading European banks to rise by 4% on average, with the gain paid for by losing vulnerable middle-office jobs and hiring engineers. Its senior analyst Tomasz Noetzel called it a “realignment, not mass job losses, for now”.
| Forecast or finding | Figure | What it tells UK readers |
|---|---|---|
| Bloomberg Intelligence, leading European banks (via City AM) | Headcount up 4% on average | Totals can rise while middle-office roles disappear |
| Morgan Stanley, European banking (via City AM) | As much as 20% of roles, around 400,000 jobs | The highest figure in City AM’s round-up, for Europe as a whole |
| Juniper Research for Zopa Bank, UK (via City AM) | 10% of UK bankers by 2030, about 27,000 roles | The only UK-specific number in the set |
| Evident, 50 banks (via Euronews) | Software implementation roles up 4.3% | The hiring side of the swap |
Strategic Reality: These forecasts are not like-for-like, and City AM said so. Read together they agree on one thing: some jobs go even where new roles replace them. The disagreement is about scale and timing.
What HSBC’s own year shows
A bank hiring wealth managers and cutting them
In July, HSBC said it would hire more than 100 AI specialists in Singapore, plus 100 wealth managers, and open an AI centre there in the latter half of 2026. Reuters reported that the centre’s first tasks include personalising wealth management conversations with customers. Reuters described the bank as concentrating on wealth and wholesale banking in Asia. We covered the Singapore hiring at the time.
Ten weeks later, the reported UK plan runs the other way: fewer advisers, fewer managers and specialists, and a statement that HSBC is “continuing to evolve to deliver more digitally enabled products and journeys”. The sources do not show that the UK cuts fund the Singapore hires, and we are not claiming they do. What they show is one group adding wealth staff in one market whilst planning, by the FT’s account, to remove them in another, with AI attached to both: in the bank’s July statement, and in the FT’s account of the UK plan. A group-wide headcount line would net those moves off against each other.
Critical Context: HSBC does not disclose how many people its UK wealth arm employs. The FT reported only that the bank is believed to employ relationship managers in the hundreds around the UK. A cut of up to 70% in advisers is a large share of a number the bank does not publish.
From the back office to the adviser’s desk
Standard Chartered, which Reuters called the first global bank to spell out AI’s effect on its workforce, aimed its cuts mostly away from customers. When it set out its plan in May, to cut 15% of its corporate-function roles by 2030 (more than 7,000 jobs by a Reuters calculation; Euronews put it at around 7,800), chief executive Bill Winters said most of the affected roles were not client-facing. Mizuho announced up to 5,000 cuts over a decade in March.
HSBC’s reported UK plan is different in kind. It targets financial advisers, whose work is advising customers. There is a precedent in wealth: City AM reported that Citigroup has shed a fifth of its wealth division’s staff since 2023, in an overhaul that followed the launch of an AI wealth assistant offering clients personalised guidance.
- The cuts are reaching client-facing work. Standard Chartered’s were mostly back office by its chief executive’s account. HSBC’s reported UK plan names advisers.
- Wealth keeps recurring. HSBC’s Singapore AI centre lists wealth conversations among its first focuses, and Citi’s wealth overhaul followed an AI assistant.
- Leaders frame the timing loosely. Norman read bank chiefs’ statements as a pattern of pushing the reckoning into the future: Barclays’ chief said the “fundamental impact” had not come through yet.
- HSBC’s chief has framed the final headcount as secondary. “However many will be left at the end of the journey isn’t the problem,” Georges Elhedery told the May investor day. The problem, he said, was giving 200,000 colleagues the training and tools to be ready.
Hidden Cost: HSBC’s statement to Reuters describes the change as meeting “the changing needs of our customers”. That phrasing needs testing against evidence of what customers asked for. We examined the same move in an earlier analysis of call-centre cuts.
Who is affected
The people most directly affected are HSBC’s UK wealth staff. The FT reported that the bank is consulting on the changes and that staff whose roles go are due to depart before October is out.
HSBC’s UK wealth customers are the second group. Neither Reuters’ account of the FT report nor HSBC’s statement explains how advice will reach them with far fewer advisers. “More digitally enabled products and journeys” describes a direction, not a service model.
The third group is the wider UK banking workforce. City AM’s June column recalled the paper’s own 2025 report that Lloyds Banking Group had warned roughly 6,000 people in technology and engineering roles that they could face redundancy, and that, according to Bloomberg, HSBC was considering a restructuring that would remove 20,000 jobs worldwide over three to five years. HSBC has not confirmed that figure in any source we fetched.
| Group | What changes for them | What is still unknown |
|---|---|---|
| HSBC UK wealth advisers, managers and specialists | Reported cuts of up to around 70% (advisers) and about half (managers and specialists), with departures expected by the end of October | How many people that is |
| HSBC UK wealth customers | Reported cuts to advisers; HSBC points to “more digitally enabled products and journeys” | How advice will be delivered and to whom |
| AI and engineering staff | HSBC is hiring AI specialists in Singapore; Evident’s 50 banks added 4.3% more software implementation roles | Whether UK roles share in that hiring |
The open questions
Aggregate figures cannot settle this
A bank can grow its headcount and still remove most of a UK advice team. Evident’s talent pillar measures AI capability, and Bloomberg Intelligence’s 4% is an average across leading European banks. Neither shows a UK adviser what happens to their role. We argued in June that macro employment data is the wrong place to look for AI’s effect on jobs, and the same applies here.
Disclosure is thin
HSBC keeps its UK wealth headcount private, and the cut figures come from unnamed sources speaking to the FT, not from the bank. Until HSBC publishes numbers, the scale is reported rather than confirmed.
”For now” is doing a lot of work
Bloomberg Intelligence’s “realignment, not mass job losses” came with the qualifier “for now”. Elhedery’s own line from May was that generative AI will both destroy certain jobs and create new ones. Neither tells a UK reader which side of that line a given role falls on, or when.
Reality Check: Euronews reported Evident’s view that AI will not gut bank workforces. That can hold across 50 global banks while one UK business is reported to be planning to cut most of its advisers. The two statements describe different populations.
What to watch
The end of October. The FT said affected HSBC staff are due to go by the close of October. Any confirmed number from HSBC, or from consultation outcomes, would turn a reported share into a count.
How HSBC serves UK wealth clients afterwards. If the bank sets out what replaces adviser contact, that will show whether the cuts are a channel shift or a service withdrawal.
The Singapore AI centre. HSBC said the centre would open in the latter half of 2026, with wealth management conversations among its first areas of focus. If that work reaches UK customers, the link between hiring in Asia and cutting in the UK will be easier to see.
Evident’s fifth pillar. Evident intends to add a measure of the outcomes banks achieve from AI in 2027. If it captures workforce effects as well as returns, the index will start to show the side of the swap it currently leaves out.
Evident and HSBC are not telling contradictory stories. The index rewards the AI talent banks are adding, and the FT reported on some of the people one bank plans to remove. UK readers following bank workforces should stop asking whether AI is creating or destroying jobs in aggregate and ask the narrower question these two days answered: whose job, in which country.
Source: HSBC plans job cuts across UK wealth business in AI push, FT reports (Reuters, 7 October 2026), filed from Bengaluru by reporters Rajveer Singh Pardesi and Ruchika Khanna, citing the Financial Times. Additional sources: UBS only European bank in top 10 of AI adoption as JPMorgan Chase leads (Euronews, 7 October 2026); Evident AI Index methodology (Evident, 2026); HSBC to hire 100 AI specialists, 100 wealth managers in boost to Singapore hub (Reuters, 27 July 2026); HSBC CEO says AI will destroy and create new jobs, urges staff to embrace change (Reuters, 20 May 2026), by Selena Li; From mild to wild: What impact will AI have on banking jobs? (City AM, 10 June 2026), by Samuel Norman.
This strategic analysis was written by Resultsense, a UK-focused AI news and analysis publication. We will be watching what HSBC confirms after its consultation closes, and whether other UK lenders follow it from the back office into advice. Read more analysis at Insights, or get in touch.