Barclays has announced that it will axe 19,000 jobs in the next three years, 7,000 of them in its investment bank, as announced by its chief executive Antony Jenkins.
The cuts will include 9,000 in the UK.
Currently Barclays has 38,800 employees in retail banking and another 26,000 in investment banking.
The announced overhaul will lead to the closure and disposal of its entire European retail business.
Outside of the investment bank, around half of the job cuts will be from branches in UK, Europe and Africa with most of the remainder slashed from operations and IT.
The restructuring includes placing retail banking in Portugal, Spain, France and Italy into a “bad bank” which will eventually sell off £115bn of non-core operations.
Jenkins said parts of the European operations could be sold or floated.
"Bad banks", or non-core divisons, have been used by a number of banks since the global financial crisis as a way of separating risky loans and assets from future business. Banks in some recession-struck countries have created “bad banks” to segment out problematic loans.
Barclays was obliged to initiate internal change as Jenkins believes the slowing down of the trading book is permanent due to tightened regulations on banks, including the need to keep greater reserves of money.
The announcement caused the share price to jump, but it still retains its position as third worst performer after HSBC and Deutsche Bank.
Last month, Barclays faced a shareholder revolt at its annual general meeting, with more than a third of investors voting against or failing to back the bank's pay plans amid outrage over its decision to increase the bonus pool of the investment bank last year despite a 37% fall in annual profits.
