The Financial Times reports this morning that Standard Chartered plans to cut more than 7,800 back-office jobs by 2030. These cuts will mean around 15 per cent of its workforce will lose their jobs. The reason? It is rolling out artificial intelligence across its global operations.
Chief executive Bill Winters, however, was at pains to insist this was not really a redundancy programme. He told investors:
"It's not cost cutting: it's replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial capital and investment capital we're putting in."
Note that phrase: "lower-value human capital".
Bill Winters is referring to real, live, warm-blooded people when making that observation. People with as much right to be alive right now as he has. People who are working for his bank in human resources, risk and compliance, and other bank back-office functions in offices in Bengaluru, Shenzhen, and Warsaw. Those people have skills, careers, and families dependent on their incomes. And the chief executive of the major bank they work for has just publicly described them to investors as "lower-value human capital".
I am certain that this is not a slip of the tongue. It is the language of a very particular worldview. In that worldview, labour is a cost to be minimised, and people are inputs to be priced. When a cheaper substitute becomes available, you substitute. That is what the textbooks say. That is what the shareholder expects. And that, it seems, is what Bill Winters believes he is doing. This is neoliberalism writ large for all to see.
There is a brutal honesty in the formulation that is, in an odd way, clarifying. Most executives reach for euphemisms when discussing redundant programmes. They talk of transformation, of investment in the future, of reskilling and redeployment. Winters has not. He has said, plainly, that some of his workforce is, in his opinion, "lower-value" and he is replacing those people with financial or technological capital. At least his employees now know where they, and by implication most of the rest of us, stand in their CEO's worldview.
The implication is that labour is now viewed as an inferior form of productive input compared to technology, automation, AI systems, software platforms, robotics, data systems, and financial investment in machinery. The assumption is that replacing people with capital equipment is inherently efficiency-enhancing. That says all we need to know about this bank, its management and the people from whom they wish to make money, many of whom will be "lower-value human capital".
And it is important to note the relevance of the numbers quoted in the article. Standard Chartered employs around 80,000 people globally. The bank is targeting a return on tangible equity of more than 15 per cent by 2028, rising to around 18 per cent by 2030. In that case, these jobs are not going because the bank is struggling. They are going because the bank wants to increase its profitability for its shareholders. AI technology makes that possible, but more importantly, the ideology of its CEO permits it.
And this is where the story becomes about economics, and political economy, and not merely corporate power. If artificial intelligence is now capable of displacing thousands of skilled workers in financial services, the question that follows is not whether that is remarkable in the literal sense of that word, because, of course, it is. The question is who captures the gain, and who bears the loss?
The answer, right now, is entirely predictable. The shareholders gain. The workers in Bengaluru, Shenzen and Warsaw lose. And governments, in Britain and elsewhere, have nothing whatever to say about it, because nothing in the current political framework requires them to. That's because they, too, subscribe to this same neoliberal logic.
That is the real issue here. What is troubling is not that a bank is using AI, or even that it is cutting jobs just to boost returns. It is that we have constructed an economic and political settlement in which it is considered entirely normal, entirely acceptable, and entirely unremarkable that a chief executive can describe his workforce as "lower-value human capital" in a briefing to investors, and nobody in government bats an eye.
The gains from artificial intelligence are built, in no small part, on publicly funded research, publicly educated workforces, and publicly maintained infrastructure. They are socialised in their origins. They are entirely privatised in their benefits. And our governments have decided that we as a society should simply accept that.
I do not think we should.
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Agreed – I mean, how will the ‘lower value human capital’ live; how will they consume the products of Bill Winters’ corporate clients? Winters and many like him cannot see beyond the end of their noses.
As the famous saying goes ‘let them eat cake’
I can see statements like these especially given what happened here
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/18/eric-schmidt-ai-university-commencement-speech-booed
causing civil unrest
Hello Richard.
it doesn’t take much imagination to see the direction of travel in this thinking. If people can be characterised as ‘lower value human capital’, without pushback from government, then society can be re-educated to think the same.
Once society thinks in this way, maybe certain political problems, like climate change, or ‘small boats’, could be solved by permanently ’replacing’ these humans with something …let’s say AI. I mean, if that was always just an excuse, who’ll even know or care?
It’s chilling because it’s entirely believable.
Agreed
That is why the sentence jumped out at me
It reminds me of THGTTG by Douglas Adams, where the Golgafrinchans decided to get rid of their “useless”/lower-value individuals (hairdressers, account executives, management consultants, and telephone sanitisers for example), and bundled them all into an Ark spaceship, only for the executives left behind to die off from a virulent disease contracted from unsanitised telephones.
🙂
It is a pretty ugly thing to say, and it does reveal a mindset focused on the spreadsheets, and not the living, breathing people he employs. I hope they find other, better jobs – if not, there will be fewer people using his bank’s services.
I think he was trying to say that sacking these people does not save money. That the investment in replacement technology would be a greater cost than the staff. A bit like replacing a manual car production line with robots costs a lot of money. Should we still be making such goods by hand? Presumably he thinks there will be increased output. But I hope someone will be checking the AI output because it can go spectacularly wrong.
The AI broligarchs did not become mega wealthy through possessing either human empathy or its corollary ability to perceive the future consequences of their personal actions. They were trained and enabled to become mega wealthy by a state economy informed by neoliberal ideology. Garbage in: Garbage out. Of course no one will be overseeing and constantly checking up on the structures informing their AI replacement of ‘lower value human capital’. It would necessitate these present Masters of our political Universe, these lauded producers of capital, destroying their entire shared worldview first.
It does not take an engineer to see clearly how this neoliberal nightmare will unfold.
Best stock up on matches and candles.
I think this happened when the old-fashioned “Personnel” became “Human Resources” which had largely happened in the UK by the time I joined the workforce in the mid 90s
Ive just had that very argument with someone talking about ‘talent management’
Im old enough to remember when you had Personnel managers and directors and without being starry eyed about it, their aim was to build the the organisation so that it had the right people equipped with the right skills. It recognised that knowing the organisation and its culture was as important, so it made sense to invest in people by giving them more and new skills rather than dump them and buy someone else. People stayed because they were invested in – staff turnover is expensive.
Then we have Human Resources where people are just another resource like tables, chairs and office space. Get rid of ones who dont have the new skills you need and buy in some new ones. Body shoppers, just hiring and firing. Attracted a whole different kind of person to work in HR compared to personnel. Loyalty to the organisation becomes pointless and I see it in my children’s generation (40ish) who dont see much point in being loyal to organisations when loyalty is so obviously not reciprocated. And then they wonder why there are skills shortages, not least amongst managers, when they’ve all cut back on training assuming that someone else will do it. UK is known to have poor management skills
Now Talent Management’. The value judgement that you’re talented or trash. Anyone who has managed a real team knows that you want a mixture of bright sparks and steady folk – the latter who get on, do a good job and dont need much managing.
There are still good organisations, public and private, who really care about the people who work for them but they are not run by ‘talent managers’
End of rant!
I used A.I. professionally (= I pay for it) to help with very large data sets (think 35,000 rows of numbers). A.I. is so dumb it cann’t even cope with the annual drop an hour, add an hour with respect to time/date (so I have to manually do that – sigh). It is also more like a 5 year old when doing pivot tables if you don’t spell it out – exactly – you are in trouble. A.I. is very good answering well defined questions. This begs the question: what happens when they ain’t (well defined).
European Commission moved over to A.I. for translation (thinking they could shed translators). Well, yes… & … no, need editors to make sure legal texts are correct & it can take almost as much time making sure the text is correct as it does just to do the translation from scratch. Good luck to Standard Charter it might find that things don’t go quite as smoothly as it thinks.
Oh, one last thing. Roger Penrose in one of his books (Emperor’s New Mind page 541) explained how ideas are formed (& his own thought processes). We (humans) have an apporimate idea of what happens wrt idea formation but so far I see no indication of the same from A.I. – this could be partly a function of processing power. on that uncertain note…ttfn
Much to agree with
A.I is still in its infancy, it’s not the next couple of years that people should concentrate on but the next couple of decades. It will massively change things.
It will. But the sackings are now.
Might this policy of dehumanisation take affected economies from the K shaped model to the E shaped model?
K shaped economy – different groups of people move in contrasting directions socio-economically
E shaped economy – high earners/receivers flourish, middle earners struggle, with some moving to th bottom bar of the E, and low earners increase in number and difficulties
Good explanation
Neo-liberalism uses language to sanitise what they are doing. Like the Bolsheviks ‘liquidised’ their opponents -murdered.
And ‘have to let you go’ for ‘I am sacking you.’
George Orwell — ‘Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ‘
Michael Hudson, the influential heterodox economist, wrote a book “J for Junk Economics” on how many of the terms and indicators in economics have been turned on their head by the neoclassical / neoliberal economists. See a review here https://www.acts.co.za/news/blog/2017/04/the-worlds-best-economist-explains-how-banks-have-captured-the-wealth-of-the-world
AI is being sold as progress, but progress for whom? Jobs are disappearing because the system has decided that workers should absorb the loss while capital captures the surplus. Gottlieb’s song Scarcity perfectly captures the anger behind this economic violence imposed on working people, violence sanitised as innovation and sold as progress: https://youtu.be/I8kgnmQWjMQ?si=zOpQaOnBYXDiqCNV
Yeah, but what surplus? If Standard Chartered’s clients followed the same playbook they would very rapidly find their bad debt provisions have to increase. A lot of banks are heavily reliant on real estate at the moment, which is reliant not only on people’s wages but also on people’s wages growing.
Nobody in government bats an eye at that phrasing; for as like the frog placed in cool water, slowly heated to boiling, society has grown used to the language that dehumanises, dejects and dismisses groups of people.
I first noted this rot in language in the 80’s when the personnel department became human resource, effectively they removed the person from the job and replaced them with a commodity, firstly in language, then in deed. Today we have phrasing like welfare or benefits instead of social security, illegal immigrants instead of asylum seekers and so on. This rotten language regularly in the media has emboldened people to use it in general discourse, yesterday a new client felt perfectly comfortable telling me the Navy should drive back all the boats to France, anyone landing should be shot and the country is being invaded by Muslims. I had to spend 10 minutes explaining, nicely, what a crackpot he was. It must be called out anytime anyone uses it but I’m getting tired, as I find it from friends, family, clients and even strangers on a daily basis.
Good luck with that.
I try to do the same thing. It is wearing.
I remember, many moons ago, being asked by head office to reduce my department by 19.5 people. I wondered who was the half person. It made me realise we are all just numbers on someone’s spreadsheet. Very sad.
But too often true
Know thy place! I expect work is being done to create care robots, although how they would provide a service remotely like that I do, I cannot imagine. However, there is no doubt that in my current role, and my post-motherhood admin jobs, my label is lower-value human capital.
Thanks for picking up on this, Richard and running with it so eloquently, pointing out that there’s no longer a filter between what they mean and what they say with no mainstream pushback, as if it’s all acceptable and inevitable.
It seems to me this is the outcome of the neoliberal/fascist mindset that has been taking hold since the Enclosures Act, whereby extraction and exploitation of people as low level resources by the powerful has been the only way to “develop wealth” (for whom?) and the holy grail of “growth”(of what?), no matter the wider consequences.
Aside from my misgivings about AI’s excessive use of real resources and its huge generation of heat pollution, the sway it will have on the makeup of society as a whole is more worrying to me, so much so that I have been listed as a “leftie Luddite” on BlueSky – a badge I wear proudly, I might add.
That trepidation led me to read Rua Williams’ book, ‘Disabling Intelligences-Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI’ which highlights that the problem isn’t one of rapacious technological advances in themselves but in the overriding neoliberal philosophy that designates those in power as legitimately worthy and the rest of us as “other” and ONLY seen as useful for our worth to their benefit (“useless eaters”, otherwise). And that AI is being rolled out in service to that philosophy.
Richard Kirby makes a comical but accurate reading of the Neoliberal take via Douglas Adams, as does Martin’s point that the language creep towards acceptability of this as normal has been in the works for a while.
Please excuse any disjointedness of my arguments, I am a “useless eater” with the brain fog of myalgic encephalitis.
Thank you for your comment. Much appreciated.
It is hard to understand how AI can survive in a world with depleted water and energy resources. On the same logic are we going to prioritise the needs of the large consumptive energy centres over us mere mortals? It is not thought through and obviously supported by those who believe technology will sort all our climate change woes. I also wonder if customers will start to object. We all remember the frustration of dealing with overseas call centres and the time and effort spent trying to explain something to someone with no knowledge of UK culture and colloquial English. It wasn’t long before insurance companies had as a selling point that all their call centres were UK based. The company may not value it’s human employees, but customers generally prefer them.
I await the coming difficulties predicted by Richard as a result of the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz with great interest.
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2026/05/16/this-could-be-as-bad-as-1929-and-maybe-very-much-worse/
Shortages of helium and basic energy are going to cause AI development significant problems/issues with the essential regular replacement of all the processors.This assumes too that all workers involved in the AI supply chain have their expected food supply available.
I suggest that AI needs a fully functioning economy to work at all. So what is going to happen when the expected update and replacement doesn’t/cannot happen?
There will certainly be a lot of fudge and fast talking to try to cover-up the lack of resilience and flexibility that is creeping into our industry with increasing AI usage. Owners of companies using AI extensively perhaps will need to try to re-hire those that are being thrown on the scrap heap, if they’re available.
Richard I was thinking how awful it is now when you have a problem with ANYTHING and you need to speak to someone to help you. We sit on chats for most of the time trying to get through to someone to help us….. we end up frustrated, exhausted, so much of our precious time taken up. Everbody complains about it. Automating services has taken away any service we have. People help people. Now that we are seen as lower value human capital it breaks my heart. We have not moved on with better services, better communication, better products. All of this hasn’t made our society easier and more helpful for us. Some people are benefitting from all this but not the everyday person. I am also shocked that so much language like this is not challenged. We are now so used to people saying what they like with no consequences. But there is hope… we always have to hope and show as much compassion and grace to our neighbours … there is another way and we need to keep fighting for it.
[…] By Richard Murphy, Emeritus Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Funding the Future […]
“Lower value human capital” – there you have the “anthropology” of Standard Chartered and the “overvalued human capital” that calls the shots (and I use the word “shots” deliberately).
A really important question to ask of any leader, or boss, or system, or ideology, or political party, or religion, is, “What is your anthropology?” and then see how their policies/programmes/doctrines/bureaucracies put that anthropology into practice.
My anthropology (follower of Jesus) is “every human being is made in the image of God and of equal worth”. Putting that into practice? Oh dear, lots of mistakes over 2000yrs (not all of them mine), but still trying.
Mine – “rhere is that of God in everyone” and even if I somtimes find it hard to spot, that’s my failing
‘lower-value human capital’
That is the truth laid bare.
Richard, I’ve just watched you on YouTube talking about Andy Burnham. I want one burning question answering- WHY do he, Starmer, Streeting, etc- NOT want to do what is clearly right? Are they literally being bribed, paid under the counter, blackmailed? It doesn’t bear repeating what we all know needs to happen- most of it is laid out in Labour’s own 2024 manifesto. I feel very angry at the thought of Burnham just being Starmer Mark 2. But I can’t get any answer as to WHY they just won’t do what is required, and I’m so awfully tired of asking the same question and being lied to by various Labour cliques for no reason I can discern. But thank you for keeping us informed. It’s early wine o clock for me.
I wonder if these type of people? Are only alive on their heads? I found what he said disturbing and as discussed already here – the insidious use of language.
I tell people now it’s not benefits,.its social security and I explain my reasons why I call it this. Change? Do it person to person and stand your ground.
The direction of travel from these so called titans of business is very disturbing.
This Palantir manifesto was chilling enough, but this analysis piece I read yesterday, was even more… worse than any sci-fi horror story I have read. Judge for yourself…
https://danielpinchbeck.substack.com/p/digital-money-for-a-prison-planet
This is the problem with being listed on a stock exchange and answerable to shareholders. Standard Chartered is currently behind its peers on RoE and it has a poor cost to income ratio. Barclays is only marginally better so I expect they will make the next move.
I won’t advertise any particular bank but if people don’t like this, then vote with your feet! You don’t have to have your current and savings account with banks that give their employees no dignity and invest your deposits in fossil fuels and other dubious sectors.
Most building societies and a handful of challenger banks are much better options.
Noted, and agreed
[…] Back then, accounting firms treated potential recruits as human beings. It would appear that, long ago, accountants forgot about that quality that a candidate might possess and have instead treated them as if they are an input into their production processes, to be treated with contempt, putting these firms in the same category as the chief executive of Standard Chartered Bank, about whom I wrote recently. […]
I think, really, he’s just saying out loud the quiet part that has been true ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Not that that excuses it in any way.