The dark side of efficiency for employees is that it can drive workplace reductions: As digital transformation plans make progress, banks are making layoffs. 

The progress of Citibank’s tech transformation projects is driving some of the thousands of layoffs it plans to make this year, chief financial officer Mark Mason said on stage during a recent Morgan Stanley conference.  

The bank is in the process of retiring legacy platforms and it’s moving its wholesale credit risk platforms to a standardized underwriting process.  

Over time, “we will no longer need the same level of people that we have at this particular phase,” Mason said on stage. “We’re reducing people even further … as we use that technology to automate a bunch of activities that we have to do manually today.” 

Citi’s tech-driven layoffs follows Capital One’s lead from earlier this year: The bank cut 1,100 people from within the agile development group of its tech department, saying that the frameworks it developed were becoming integrated into the bank’s core engineering practices, making jobs redundant.