Bill Winters has taken an axe to Standard Chartered, with the emerging market bank’s new chief executive revealing plans to raise £3.3bn in a rights issue while cutting 15,000 jobs.
StanChart said yesterday that the job cuts, out of a total workforce of 86,000, were part of a beefed-up restructuring programme to reduce costs by $2.9bn, after the bank suffered its first quarterly loss in 15 years.
Mr Winters, a former JPMorgan investment banker hired by StanChart in May, presented details of a long-awaited strategic review, which includes moves to restructure or reduce $100bn of its $315bn of underperforming risk-weighted assets in the next three years, plans that he described as “aggressive and decisive”.