"UniCredit SpA" Italia and "Erste Group Bank" will not layoff people in their Romanian subsidiaries

"UniCredit SpA" Italia and "Erste Group Bank" do not intend to make any layoffs in Romania, even though they had announced that they had plans to restructure employees on a group level.

The representatives of "UniCredit Ţiriac Bank" have said that the parent bank has announced a major plan to expand over the course of the next five years. This plan involves increasing the number of employees, as well as enhancing their professional development, through training programs and specializations, according to the officials of "UniCredit Ţiriac Bank".

The officials of "Erste Group Bank" have said that the downsizing which was announced in the beginning of the year, was made at the "Èeská spoøitelna Group" subsidiary.

According to the representatives of "Erste Group Bank", "the layoffs announced in the beginning of the year are tied to the measures adopted in 2009 and 2010, which were aimed at improving the performance of the processes and systems of the < Èeská spoøitelna Group > (the centralization of the back office operations, the creation of the early collection center, the centralization of the IT services etc.)",.

They also said that the measure was intended to eliminate those positions which were not efficient enough in the long run and which had proven redundant.

"We only lowered our number of employees when the economy began to recover, after postponing the taking of that measure during the crisis", the representatives of "Erste Group Bank" said.

At the end of December 2010, "Erste" had 50,272 employees, whereas at the end of June 2011, the number had reached 50,425.

Since January 1st, the top 50 banks in the world, including "HSBC Holdings" Plc, "Credit Suisse Group" AG and "Bank of America" Corp., have announced layoffs which would affect 60,000 people, according to a study by Bloomberg Industries. The review states that this pace will result in more than 101,000 layoffs this year, the largest number since 2008, when 192,000 positions were affected.

Some of the banks that announced layoffs this year include "Intesa Sanpaolo" SpA of Italy (3,000), "Lloyds Banking Group" Plc of Great Britain (16,800), "Credit Suisse Group" AG Switzerland (2,025), "Barclays" Plc UK (3,000), "Bank of America" Corp. (1,575), "Goldman Sachs Group" Inc. SUA (1,000), "UniCredit" SpA Italia (700), "Erste Group Bank" AG Austria (550).