In the just-passed first half of 2024, are listed banks increasing or decreasing their staff, as the interest rate pressure lingers and some banks' downsizing trend made it to the hot search list not long ago?

Many banks, including Bank of Nanjing, Ping An Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, and Shanghai Rural Commercial Bank, have released their half-year reports for 2024 as of the time when the reporter of Caixin submitted the report. According to East Money Information statistics, the number of employees decreased by 4,116 at these four banks in the first half of this year. Among the listed banks that have already announced their half-year report, only Bank of Jiangsu slightly increased its staff by 28 people.

Due to the fact that the half-year reports of state-owned banks have not been disclosed yet, it is impossible to accurately judge the overall change of staff number of listed banks in the first half of this year. It is worth noting that the annual report showed that the number of employees of the six-state-owned banks had been increasing. Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Bank of Communications, Postal Savings Bank of China and other four state-owned banks saw a significant increase in staff in 2023, directly leading to the total number of employees of the six major banks remaining positively increasing (by about 0.02 million people) in 2023.

Two joint-stock banks reduce staff by more than 1,000, while only Bank of City Flourishing slightly increases staffing in the first half of the year.

As a traditional employer, is the banking industry still expanding its workforce this year? Judging from the latest half-year report, downsizing is a more common situation among disclosed data banks.

On July 31, Bank of Nanjing became the first listed bank to release its 2024 interim report. How many employees did it add in the first half of this year? According to the East Money Information, the total number of Bank of Nanjing's employees was 16,260 in the first half of 2024, while it was 16,342 at the end of 2023. This means that the bank downsized by 82 employees in the first half of this year.

In addition, Ping An Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, and Shanghai Rural Commercial Bank also downsized their staff in the first half of this year. According to East Money Information statistics, the number of Ping An Bank's employees decreased to 40,830 from 43,119 at the end of 2023, a decrease of 2,289; the number of employees of Shanghai Pudong Development Bank decreased to 61,892 from 63,582 at the end of 2023, a decrease of 1,690; and the number of employees of Shanghai Rural Commercial Bank decreased to 11,240 from 11,295 at the end of last year, a decrease of 55.

Compared to the obvious downsizing of Bank of Nanjing, Ping An Bank, and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, Bank of Jiangsu can be called a "reverse player." According to East Money Information statistics, the number of employees of Bank of Jiangsu was 16,335, an increase of 28 over the end of last year.

According to the East Money Information statistics, the cumulative number of job cuts at four banks, Bank of Nanjing, Ping An Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, and Shanghai Rural Commercial Bank, in the first half of this year was 4,116.

Ping An Bank and Bank of Nanjing spoke out, "empowering fintech," while Bank of Nanjing is exploring the integration of large-scale model and business.

In the eyes of the industry, the continuous development of financial technology not only changes the traditional banking operating model, but also saves a lot of manpower. Reporters noticed that both Ping An Bank and Bank of Nanjing have made relevant introductions on the development of financial technology in their latest half-year report.

Ping An Bank stated in its half-year report that it is continuing to promote digital operation and transformation, enhancing operation efficiency, and upgrading operation risk management capabilities. In terms of customer service, it aims to improve customer service efficiency by upgrading intelligent cloud service platforms and AI customer-interface capabilities. Through virtual digital personnel, the rate of automation of operation audit work reached about 49% by the end of June 2024, an increase of about 4 percentage points compared to the end of last year. Regarding delivery, through digital means such as intelligent character recognition (ICR), it aims to promote operation automation and intensification, and the rate of digitization of the centralized operation center has increased to 92.3%.

In addition, Bank of Nanjing stated in its semi-annual report that during the reporting period, it integrated the three fintech capabilities of cloud, online, and intelligent technologies into the entire value chain of its operations based on the overall technology work goal of "improving business operation value, reducing operating management costs, enhancing customer satisfaction externally, and unleashing employee productivity internally". It fully empowered the operation management of the entire bank. First, it constructed a full-process credit business risk control system through the successful completion of the Xinba III project group; second, it built a research platform to empower various business departments; third, it accelerated the promotion of the staff workstation project, gradually providing operation personnel with a one-stop work platform in the first phase; fourth, it optimized channel experience and improved channel operation capabilities; fifth, it actively explored the fusion of new technologies such as generative large-scale models with business scenarios, enriched the pool of AI application scenarios, and launched human-machine collaborative intelligent outbound calls to improve the efficiency of reaching target customers.