An alternative explanation is they are preemptively downsizing in advance of the next crash.
You should always look very carefully at non-GAAP numbers. They can be good supplemental information or they can be total BS.
They are cutting 25,000 jobs over the next two years, and they will be selling business units to third parties - units that employ about 25,000 people. Selling a business to someone else is not firing that business's employees.
Two things should be fairly obvious:
(1) more and more banking is being done directly online and lots of transactions that used to require tellers in rented offices tended by security guards now only require an app, and
(2) post-credit crunch risk rules are being enforced, meaning that heavily risk-weighted businesses require more capital commitment to the point that they are less attractive to own.
I understand that the socialist contingent on FR believes that large companies are not businesses but jobs programs.
In real life even the morons at ZeroHedge who are invariably wrong about everything know that going into a bank and waiting to see a teller, or filling out a loan application in ballpoint pen so a loan officer can type it into a PC is about as sustainable a business model as renting videotapes from a storefront.
Someone doesn’t understand simple business economics... and I’m thinking it is the author.