2025 Had 8,200 AI-Linked Job Cuts. 7 Months Into 2026, It’s 70,000

For most of last year, the tally of AI-linked job losses in banking and fintech looked almost reassuring. Over the whole of 2025, the Fintech News Network's ongoing tracker recorded just seven announcements affecting around 8,200 roles across the sector — a number worth watching, but hardly a sign of upheaval.

Seven months into 2026, that picture has inverted. The tracker now counts 20 separate announcements covering 70,415 roles between January and July — more than eight times the full-year 2025 figure. The monthly average has jumped from roughly 683 roles last year to above 10,000 so far this year, and the average single announcement has grown from about 1,170 roles to over 3,500. All told, it has logged 78,615 roles across 27 announcements since January 2025, and nearly 90% of those cuts landed in 2026 alone.

Much of the surge traces back to a handful of global banks. HSBC, Citigroup and Standard Chartered together account for about 47,000 roles in this year's tracker, and adding Morgan Stanley, Commerzbank and Nordea pushes six banking groups past roughly 54,000 roles — more than three-quarters of 2026's total. For Singapore the shift is more than academic: DBS's planned reduction of around 4,000 temporary and contract roles was the single largest entry in the entire 2025 tracker, while Standard Chartered — one of the city-state's biggest foreign banks — plans to remove more than 7,000 corporate-function roles by 2030, with automation expected to absorb part of that work as spending shifts toward technology.

The cuts are spreading beyond banking into payments and crypto, where executives are unusually direct about running smaller, AI-native teams. Visa confirmed about 2,600 job cuts in July, mainly across technology and product roles, with its CEO citing AI as a driver; Coinbase trimmed roughly 14% of its workforce and pushed towards smaller teams; Crypto.com cut around 12%. The common thread is that AI is no longer a background story about future potential — it is a live input into how many people a financial firm expects to employ.

Why it matters for Singapore: Singapore sits at the sharp end of both halves of this story. It is courting AI investment and talent at the same time that its largest financial employers — HSBC and Standard Chartered's regional hubs, and homegrown DBS — are recomposing their workforces around automation. For the tens of thousands employed across the city-state's financial district, these numbers point to where AI's most direct displacement is likely to land first: the back and middle offices that global banks are already restructuring. The real question for Singapore is less whether AI will change work here, and more how fast its upskilling and reskilling pipelines can keep pace with reductions running at nearly fifteen times last year's rate.