Yes Bank has cut as much as 12 percent or 2,500 jobs from its workforce citing poor performance and impact of digitisation.
"As part of the bank's regular human capital management practices, to ensure higher productivity and improved efficiencies, the bank undertakes some performance-linked actions on a periodic basis," Yes Bank told the Economic Times in an e-mailed response.
The private lender stated that its attrition rate is in line with the industry average. The Indian banking industry has an annual attrition rate of 16-22 percent.
"We have a process of identifying bottom performers every year as part of our normal appraisal cycle. These actions are not any different from those being pursued by other leading private sector banks," ET quoted Yes Bank as saying.
Speaking to the daily, a bank insider indicated that the lender will continue to cut jobs in the near future in a bid to reduce redundancy. At the same time, the private bank will attract top talent for key growth functions of the bank. At the end of the June quarter the lender had a workforce of 20,851 people.
Rana Kapoor, the founder, managing director (MD) and chief executive officer (CEO) of Yes Bank wrote in an email to his top management: "The greatest threat that the banking sector is facing is obsolescence risk of all physical assets like branches, ATMs, cards, point of sale terminals etc. Hence, our expansion must be prudent and under control," ET reported.
Traditional jobs are vanishing with advances in technology and acceleration of automation. Some Indian banks are trying robotics in certain operations to reduce the need for human resources.
Recently, another private lender HDFC Bank had launched its EVA, India's first AI-based banking chatbot that can answer millions of customer queries across multiple channels instantly.
"The bank's digital transformation exercise is also underway with a greater degree of automation and digitisation, aimed at better productivity and cost efficiency, and customer service. This will additionally aid in rationalising some redundancies. It will be our constant endeavour to further digitise bank operations," the bank said.
Earlier, HDFC Bank trimmed it employee strength by about 11,000 over the three quarters to March 2017, reported news portal Moneycontrol.
Between December 2016 and March 2017, the bank's staff strength has fallen by 6,096 or 7 percent to 84,325.
"We have not replaced the staff which has moved out due to attrition and have rebalanced our capabilities due to the increase in digital transactions," Moneycontrol quoted Paresh Sukthankar, Deputy Managing Director at HDFC Bank as saying.
