Societe Generale is to create a new French retail bank through a merger with its unit Credit du Nord, leading to 3700 job losses between 2023 and 2025.
The merger will create a single bank with one branch network, one head office and one IT system serving nearly 10 million clients.
The bank is aiming for a headcount of 25000, with a net reduction of 3,700 jobs between 2023 and 2025. The job cuts will come about through natural attrition, estimated at 1,500 a year per annum until 2025, and priority will be placed on job reclassification and internal mobility to ensure no compulsory redundancies.
SocGen says the bank will continue to hire new staff through this period, following the recruitment of 1400 employees on permanent contracts by the end of 2021.
The regrouped network will have around 1,450 branches in 2025 and will not involve an exit from any town entailing the closure of sites located close to each other in the same town.
The IT overhaul will take place during the first half of 2023.
"Our goal is to ensure more efficient end-to-end handling of our clients’ requests," says the bank in a statement. "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, with a target of 30% of product sales being fully digital by 2025 for eligible products and ongoing enhancement of the Societe Generale mobile banking app. 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."