Swiss bank UBS will cut about 10,000 jobs to save up to £2.3bn
by the end of next year with more highly skilled IT workers to
flood onto a finance sector already saturated by IT skills.
The bank is
pulling out of
certain businesses. Although it did not give details of where
the cuts will be made the IT jobs that support these functions are
likely to be cut.
The bank currently has 76,200 employees in more than50
countries.
More details of the restructuring will be published on 5
May.
Investment banks have been hit hardest by the credit crunch and
the economic turmoil that followed it. Credit Suisse announced
5,300 job cuts and the Bank of America's (BoA) takeover of Merrill
Lynch is expected to lead to as many as 20,000 redundancies.
According to Bob McDowall, an analyst at TowerGroup, as many as
300,000 people could have lost their jobs in the financial
services sector globally by the end of 2009, with as many as 25% of
that total drawn from IT professionals.
These IT workers, with their experience and strong work ethic,
will have opportunities in other sectors, according to James
Martin, former IT COO at Lehman Brothers in the UK. He said former
investment bank IT workers will move into retail banking as high
street banks, insurers and the like take advantage of their skills
and experience.
"The IT people from the investment banks will start to migrate
to retail financial services and they will become a very powerful
force within it," says Martin.