AIB has paused plan that were announced in March to cut roughly 1,300 jobs. This pause in reducing their employees was become AIB states that they need staff to help them deal with the economic fallout caused by COVID-19.
Back in March, AIB announced that they planned to cut their staff workforce by 2022 down to below 8,000 employees. In March, the economic forecasts for the full year of 2020 were more dire than they currently are, so that may have been a potential motivator for the creation of this workforce reduction plan.
As it currently stands, the workforce at AIB is roughly 9,3000 strong and the employee reduction plan remains in play. The implementation of this workforce reduction plan has been temporarily paused as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic according to AIB’s CEO, Colin Hunt. Colin Hunt stated that they need all hands-on deck, so to speak, so now isn’t a good time to be having a voluntary severance process.
AIB needs their employees for a large number of tasks currently as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. AIB needs to manage approximately 64,000 payment breaks for customers, as well as overseeing the many of the bank’s employees shift to remote work. In addition to all of that, AIB expects there to be a rise in activity from business customers as a result of a credit guarantee scheme that is being created by the government.
Unfortunately for AIB, their workforce continues to decrease as some of their employees either retire and/or leave for other jobs. This workforce decrease combined with a recruitment freeze for AIB means that the employees of AIB will have their hands full for the time being.
This announcement came after the bank released their interim report. In AIB’s interim report, they announced that they were setting aside €1.2 billion to deal with losses across all their portfolios as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Within the report, AIB, states that they lost €700 million in the first six months of 2020. You can read more about AIB’s interim report here.
AIB’s interim report was released one day after the Bank of Ireland released their interim report and announced that they lost €669 million during the first half of 2020.
This article was written by Ian, an intern at Irish Mortgage Brokers and Yes.ie from the USA.
References:
https://www.independent.ie/business/irish/aib-pauses-plans-to-cut-1300-jobs-39427754.html