The banking group Société Générale has just announced this Monday the elimination of 947 positions at its headquarters “without forced departures” as part of a plan to reduce its costs. This departure of 5% of the workforce aims to “group and pool certain activities and functions, to eliminate hierarchical layers to simplify decision-making processes” and to “resize certain teams”, explained the group in a press release.
To achieve this, “in addition to voluntary departures”, Société Générale – which employs some 56,000 people in France out of 117,500 worldwide – should “not replace all retirements”, an internal source tells us. The group’s central functions in La Défense, near Paris, as well as IT should be mainly affected, specifies Les Echos.
Contacted by Le Figaro on Saturday, the group’s management declined to make any further comments. This job reduction plan is the first by Slawomir Krupa, general director of the bank since May 2023. Its scale has almost doubled compared to the information published on January 19 by the Bloomberg agency, which had reported a plan providing more than 500 positions eliminated.
Also read: Société Générale could cut 500 jobs in France
Slawomir Krupa seeks to relaunch the bank after fifteen checkered years under the leadership of Frédéric Oudéa, punctuated by crises and scandals (consequences of the Kerviel affair, indictment of the bank in the Panama affair Papers or even a search last year at headquarters on the “cumcum” file…). The bank thus made public on September 18 a target of 1.7 billion euros in savings by 2026 (compared to 2022), during the presentation of the bank’s strategic orientations by Slawomir Krupa, poorly received on the stock market. .
This figure included savings already announced, such as those generated by the merger between the two retail banking networks in France, Société Générale and Crédit du Nord, and by the takeover of Leaseplan by the automobile leasing subsidiary ALD. The merger of the Société Générale and Crédit du Nord networks is accompanied by a significant reduction in the number of agencies – 1,450 agencies in 2025 compared to 2,100 five years earlier – and 3,700 positions eliminated, an “effort” distributed between 2023 (around 30%), 2024 (50%), 2025 (20%), without forced departure. Several unions had expressed their concerns in recent days.
“Management has not denied the rumors of a plan to cut jobs in Parisian central services,” the SNB-CFE-CGC was alarmed at the end of January on its website. “Given the trauma of the employees who see the plans to cut jobs one after the other (…) it is urgent that management expresses itself on these possible projects,” insisted the first union of the bank.
The CGT Société Générale (3rd organization) for its part assured Thursday on its site that “it has been a few weeks since all of the rooms in the historic towers of the Société Générale de La Défense were requisitioned” as of Monday, in anticipation of the announcement of the job reduction plan. “We are now waiting for an honest and transparent presentation of the extent of the reorganizations, their real economic justifications, their motivations and their medium or long term objectives,” the union requested.
