Headcount at Zions Bancorp will be 3% lower at the start of 2024 compared with the prior year, the bank's CEO said, joining a chorus of bankers who are using job cuts as a way to control rising costs.
The cuts will impact about 300 of Zions' roughly 10,000 employees. Much of the headcount reduction has been in roles that don't deal directly with clients or generate revenue, the bank said in a statement.
It is unclear whether the 3% reduction includes attrition. But Zions said that the cuts have been spread across the company's geographic and departmental footprints.
Banks large and small have
"I talk to our peers, and everybody's looking for ways to cut costs," Zions CEO Harris Simmons said at an industry conference hosted by Barclays on Wednesday.
Salt Lake City-based Zions spent $324 million on salaries and employee benefits in the second quarter of 2023, according to regulatory filings. That was a 6% increase from the $307 million reported in the second quarter of 2022.
Noninterest expenses totaled $508 million at Zions in the second quarter, up more than 9% from a year ago. Zions, which reported $89 billion of assets at the end of the quarter, spent $13 million on severance expenses between April and June.
Expenses "tend to be running a touch higher than expected" across the industry, Barclays analyst Jason Goldberg wrote in a research note this week.
Several other large banks that presented at this week's Barclays conference have mentioned ongoing plans to keep expenses in check moving forward, including The Bank of New York Mellon and Northern Trust.
Also this week, Truist Financial
Banks with more than $5 billion in uninsured deposits are expecting to
Zions' goal is to "flatten expenses over the next year," Simmons told analysts on an earnings call in July, citing a "more challenging revenue environment."
Allissa Kline contributed to this report.
