Standard Chartered swings the axe

published 6 November 2015

Standard Chartered has launched a major restructuring programme after reporting its first quarterly loss since the Asian crisis in the late 1990s. It will reduce its workforce of 86,000 by 15,000 over the next three years as part of a bid to cut the bank's cost base by 30%. The bank will scrap the final dividend and restructure around a third of its risk-weighted assets in order to bolster returns. The shares have halved in the past two years as the Asia and emerging-market-focused group has lost its way.

What the commentators said

The idea now is to shift the emphasis from corporate banking to "affluent retail clients". But this will be "much harder to pull off than it sounds", said Alistair Osborne in The Times. Standard Chartered may have a 150-year-old brand, but competition is intense.The bank's big shareholders, including Aberdeen Asset Management, "should look in the mirror", said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. The market has "smelled trouble" for years, yet the shareholders raised barely a murmur. "They were too willing to believe the boasts from the highly remunerated boardroom."

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Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.