HSBC plans 70% cuts to UK wealth advisers

Up to around 70 percent of financial adviser roles inside HSBC’s UK wealth arm are expected to be cut. About 50 percent of management and specialist roles face the same proposals. A person familiar with the plans called them deep, wide and brutal. Almost entire teams would be made redundant.

The consultation is already under way. HSBC is talking with staff in its UK wealth-management business. The bank does not publicly disclose headcount for the division. It is thought to employ hundreds of relationship managers across the United Kingdom—the people who hold the bank’s day-to-day ties to clients with substantial assets. Wealth management is the advisory service that gathers investment planning, tax work, estate design, and the growth and protection of family money into a single relationship for affluent and high-net-worth customers. HSBC, the London-headquartered group that began in Hong Kong in 1865 and now ranks among Europe’s largest banks, has long sold that UK service as a premium offer inside its retail and private-banking franchise. The consultation now reaches the ranks that deliver it.

No public figure has been put on the number of roles at risk. The proposals reach the people closest to client money and reverse the expansion set for those same ranks only two years earlier. In 2024 a hiring drive aimed to add hundreds of relationship managers to a team then four hundred strong. The plan targeted a doubling of UK wealth assets to £100 billion by 2030 and a place among Britain’s top five wealth managers. Wealth assets are the client balances placed with the bank for investment, protection and transfer. At the end of 2025 the retail banking and wealth division grew by £9 billion, taking its total to more than £62 billion. The balances rose in the direction the plan had set. The people hired to carry that growth were the relationship managers who held day-to-day contact with those accounts.

Jose Carvalho led UK retail banking and wealth through the four years of that build-out. He left his post three weeks before the consultation became public. The expansion designed to swell the adviser ranks was already being undone.

In May, at an investor event in Hong Kong, Georges Elhedery set out how artificial intelligence would reshape the bank he ran. He had made AI the centre of a drive to raise productivity across the group—simplifying operations, personalising customer-facing services, and delivering digitally enabled products and journeys for wealthy clients. Generative AI is software trained on large volumes of data that can draft analysis, surface market patterns and produce tailored investment recommendations. The bank had already begun equipping its relationship managers with tools of that kind, including systems that delivered market insights and personalised investment strategies so staff could serve customers faster.

Elhedery stated the employment consequence directly. "We all know generative AI will destroy certain jobs and will create new jobs." Staff, he said, had to take the shift with him. They must not be "disenfranchised, not anxious, overwhelmed, and resisting the change."

"I need 200,000 colleagues with us on this journey – however many will be left at the end of the journey isn't the problem."

Angeline Ong, senior technical analyst at IG, said: "HSBC's cuts tell a story of AI moving up the value chain into client-facing roles that banks have historically protected." Client-facing roles are the advisers who deal directly with the customer rather than processing work behind the scenes. A spokesperson for the bank said: "We're continuing to evolve to deliver more digitally-enabled products and journeys, to support our best-in-class wealth service and meet the changing needs of our customers."

At Standard Chartered, Bill Winters set out plans to cut around 7,800 roles by 2030 as the bank used more AI. He described the change as replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial capital and investment capital the bank was putting in. He later apologised for the comments. Elhedery told Bloomberg Television in August he would be "extremely happy" if AI tools made staff more productive.

The staff affected by the proposals are expected to leave by the end of October 2026. HSBC employs an estimated 35,000 people across the United Kingdom. Inside the UK franchise the wealth business holds £134 billion of wealth balances, split roughly equally between private banking and premier banking. Private banking is the channel reserved for the bank’s highest-net-worth clients. Premier banking covers the wider affluent tier. The two channels together carry the full £134 billion on the UK books—the client assets already placed with HSBC under those labels, held for growth, protection and transfer according to each household’s plan.

A spokesperson for the bank said: "HSBC UK is a long-established, leading UK wealth manager and premium banking provider." By the end of October 2026 the advisers marked for exit are due to be gone.