One of the largest banks in Zimbabwe, CBZ, has retrenched 347 employees out of a total 1,448. The bank retrenched the employees last week following a “restructuring exercise” that started in October last year.
It’s not clear what kind of employees have been affected the most. Zimbabwean ‘corporates’ have generally been known to be top management heavy. Most have been criticised for retrenching lower level staff while retaining managers who are generally paid more, making such exercises less effective.
The bank released a statement about the retrenchment this weekend:
The retrenched CBZ employees face extremely limited prospects for re-employment in the formal sector given the country’s widespread unemployment and economic challenges. The timing is especially tough as other major employers are also downsizing or closing operations, creating an increasingly crowded pool of job seekers.
For many of these former bank employees, their specialized skills in traditional banking operations may not easily transfer to the digital economy, particularly given Zimbabwe’s limited technology sector.
The loss of steady employment will likely force many into the informal sector, where income is both unpredictable and generally lower than their previous banking salaries.
Financial institutions in Zimbabwe have not been spared the country’s economic downturn in the past few years, which has largely been blamed on incompetence by the government especially on currency and inflation matters.
Banks are looking to transition most operations to digital channels in place of physical branches, to save costs. One digital platform can handle thousands of transactions that would normally require multiple tellers. And digital operations are centralised eliminate duplicate roles across branches.
The emergence of smarter AI powered chatbots over the past few years is also gradually reducing the need for huge call centre teams.
