AI in wealth management is not advanced enough to justify huge reductions in headcount, experts say, as HSBC is said to be planning aggressive cuts to wealth roles as part of its latest AI push.
Around half of business management and specialist roles in HSBC’s UK wealth management division could go, with reductions in the ranks of financial advisers likely to be closer to 70 per cent as the bank rolls out AI to high-net-worth clients, people familiar with the matter told the FT earlier this week. They described the planned cuts as “deep, wide and brutal”.
However, AI benchmarking firm Evident said the technology is not advanced or well integrated enough in financial workflows to warrant significant job cuts.
“I don’t expect to see cuts across the board in wealth management because of AI,” Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-founder and co-chief executive of Evident, told The Banker, adding that leading wealth managers such as UBS and Morgan Stanley, which are rapidly deploying AI, are growing, not cutting headcount.
“Teams are working harder, and they are adding more tech people to build and scale AI tools,” she said.
More broadly, headcount among banks investing most aggressively in AI and deploying it at scale is increasing, according to Mousavizadeh. Evident’s 2026 AI Index, which ranks 50 of the world’s largest lenders on their AI maturity, only tracks roles across the AI and data talent stack, rather than jobs created or lost in unrelated functions.
Evident claims the leading banks in its AI index are “not using AI to cut their way to savings”.
In July, AdvisorHub reported that Morgan Stanley was cutting an unspecified number of operational staff in its wealth management division but the cuts were attributed to consolidation of support functions rather than AI.
This summer Goldman Sachs hired its largest-ever cohort of more than 120 new private wealth advisers into its four-week boot camp, a 30 per cent increase on last year’s intake, according to Business Insider.
Chief operating officer John Waldron told the news outlet that the bank plans to continue to hire large numbers of private wealth advisers, knowing that the “relationship-building game is a long-term one”.
In August, Citigroup cut around a fifth of its wealth management staff as part of a restructuring under Andy Sieg, who joined Citi as head of wealth in September 2023.
However, announcing its new AI-powered avatar “Citi Sky” for investors back in April, Sieg insisted that the technology “doesn’t replace our advisers — it makes them more powerful, extending their reach and deepening their impact”. He added that Citi planned to recruit more advisers in the coming years.
In the longer term, however, Beat Wittmann, chair and partner of Porta Advisors, said AI will have a profound impact on personnel and related costs, with most non-client-facing jobs in wealth management “endangered”.
