Credit Suisse slashes 4,000 bank jobs

CREDIT Suisse has lurched to a £1.6bn loss and announced it will cut 4,000 job cuts by the end of the year.

The lender, which employs 6,600 people in London, was last year hit by a spiralling litigation bill, a £2.6bn writedown in its investment bank, and turbulence in financial markets.

Confirmation that it has notched up its first annual loss since the depths of the financial crisis in 2008, comes just 24 hours after Lloyds cut 1,755 staff, as part of a programme of 9,000 redundancies. Credit Suisse said it was too early to say where the job cuts will fall and gave no details of the wrongdoing which has landed it with such a huge litigation bill.

But it is feared that up to 2,000 staff in London – predominantly those in administrative and IT roles – could be affected.

The Zurich-based lender said it planned to save £620m from what it called ‘right-sizing’ in London – jargon for cutting jobs. It wants to move many jobs to cheaper places which could include its offices in Poland and Dublin.

The bank, which made a £2.5bn profit in 2014, has also cut its bonus pool by 11pc to slash costs.

The £2.6bn write down is linked to Credit Suisse’s ill-fated acquisition of US investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in 2000.

It fell to new boss Tidjane Thiam, the former boss of insurance giant Prudential, to deliver the dire results. Since taking the helm at Credit Suisse in June, he has announced a major restructuring which has included increasing its focus on its wealth management business and Asian operations, and scaling down its struggling investment bank.

This has included a three-year target of cutting costs by £2.4bn.

Thiam warned: ‘We expect markets to remain volatile throughout the remainder of the first quarter of 2016 as macroeconomic issues persist.’