Oct 14, 2021

14th October 2021 Major French bank Société Générale is set to cut 3,700 jobs between 2023 and 2025 as part of a merger between its retail network and its subsidiary Credit du Nord. Société Générale says the losses will occur through natural attrition In a notice posted this week, the bank says it is aiming for a total headcount at the new retail bank of 25,000. It says the job losses will occur through normal employee attrition, which it pits at 1,500 per year. SocGen announced the merger in September 2020 and plans for the new bank to operate on a single branch network, use a single head office, and run with a single IT infrastructure. “The shift from two IT systems to one, combined with greater investment in data and artificial intelligence, will enable us to speed up the digital transformation of our model,” the bank writes. “We will make our back-office operations more efficient through greater specialisation of teams by transaction, and a decrease in the number of processing sites from 24 to 13.” The regrouped network will have around 1,450 branches in 2025, and SocGen says it will not shut down any branches where they are the only presence in a French town. Still, the bank says it is targeting the digital needs of its customers, and plans for 30% of product sales being fully digital in four years. The legal merger of the two entities is set for January 2023, when all employees of Credit du Nord will join the new venture. The merger of IT infrastructures is expected to begin in the first half of 2023.