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Banco Sabadell will cut staff to reduce costs
Barcelona, May 28 (EFE) .- Banco Sabadell’s new strategic plan contemplates cost savings of 100 million euros between now and 2023, an objective that it hopes to achieve through different means, including a staff adjustment. The plan, which the new CEO, César González-Bueno, presented to investors and analysts this Friday, foresees that Sabadell will reach a 6% profitability in 2023 and that by then the group’s profit will be over 670 million euros. euros. “We are committed to seeking the profitability of the bank by all means, including also measures to review the number of people who work in it,” explained the chief executive of Sabadell in statements to the media. González-Bueno considers it “essential” to review the bank’s cost structure and acknowledges that one of the measures to be applied, but not the only one, will be “to consider additional outlets.” Sabadell closed in the first quarter of this year a plan to reduce the workforce by 1,800 people with early retirement and voluntary redundancies, which will allow it to reduce personnel costs by 140 million. Therefore, applying a rule of three, to cut expenses by another 100 million euros, the entity would have to do without about 1,200 employees. Its objective is to have a cost base of 2,900 million in 2023, compared to the 3,000 that it registered at the end of 2020. The CEO has not detailed the scope that this new personnel restructuring will have, but has indicated that the objective is to promote the cost saving measures in the second half of the year to be implemented in early 2022. César González-Bueno has ensured that the new strategic plan is “realistic” and transformative and that it is based on three basic pillars: the promotion of the corporate banking, the greater digitization of the retail business and the good results that TSB, the British subsidiary, is beginning to reap. Regarding TSB, the manager has made it clear that for now it is not being sold, nor is the Mexican subsidiary, and has been convinced that “it will give great joys in the near future”, given the good performance of the first quarter. “It would not make sense for the bank to waste its profitability after all it suffered,” said the executive, who expects the British subsidiary to reach a ROTE of more than 6% in 2023. “In the short term nothing is sold because the bank has enough capital to develop its strategic plan and has a clear improvement projection,” he insisted. Despite everything, Banco Sabadell’s focus is on the Spanish market and on corporate, individual and corporate banking: “the bank’s essential businesses are Spanish. The other businesses are not the essential core of the profile of bank, which does not mean that they have to be sold. ” Sabadell, with a 40% penetration in corporate banking, wants to strengthen its position in this segment and increase its business volume thanks to a specialization of the network and the opportunities opened up by the Next Generation EU recovery plan. “We estimate that the investment that the Next Generation funds will generate for the bank as a whole will be around 125,000 million euros,” said Carlos Ventura, general director of the bank and head of the Business and Network Unit. The entity also intends to transform individual banking with a fully digitized business model for some products, such as consumer loans, means of payment and checking accounts. For its part, the marketing of mortgages, savings, investment and insurance products will have a mixed distribution model, through telematic channels and branch managers. All these changes must translate into an improvement in the results of the group, which aims to achieve a profitability of 6% in 2023, compared to the current 1.25%. “It will not be an easy task, but we believe we can do it,” González-Bueno said. Regarding the delinquency rate, Sabadell estimates that it will remain at levels similar to the current ones and that in no case will the rates of the previous crisis be reached. “We believed that this was going to be worse than what we see materialize,” they underline from the entity. “This strategic plan is developed in a relatively short term, barely two and a half years, and sets realistic objectives based on the strengths of Banco Sabadell. With this, we will lay the sustainable and solid foundations that will allow us to continue increasing profitability and value of the franchise “, González-Bueno has remarked. (c) EFE Agency
