The number of employees in the banking sector fell to less than 61,800 in December 2012, 20,200 of them working in central offices and 41,600 in branches. Employees in central offices therefore account for 33% of the total, and are visibly less affected by the restructuring the system has gone through in the last few years.
“It’s no surprise that the number of employees in branches is going down faster. It is only natural that the restructuring of the banking system would have a greater impact on the territorial networks because expansion has been very aggressive during the boom years and networks clearly have been too big for the demand of financial products for quite some time now,” believes Radu Craciun, chief investment officer with Eureko and former chief economist with ABN Amro (currently RBS).
The entire system shrank to 5,724 branches last year. Bankers stepped up restructuring and the branches closed in 2012 account for 40% of those closed since the December 2008. Banks had more than 6,500 branches back in the boom days.
Almost 10,000 people have left the banking system over the last four years, which means bank personnel decreased by 14%. Most of them left from territorial branches and not from central offices. Craciun says this is partly because banks recruited people with certain skills for their central offices, which they are more reluctant to let go.
Banks avoided restructuring the territorial network for a long time, hoping the economy would make a quick recovery, as they did not want a new lending boom to find them with an undersized network.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)