Nordea expects to shed 1,500 jobs in the next two years with the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
The bank, which has about 30,000 staff, disclosed its plans to change the “workforce composition” to investors, with €190m in planned restructuring costs.
Nordea’s 2030 strategy was announced in November 2025. At the time, the bank said: “Technology, data and AI will be central to this shift. They will enable Nordea to turn local processes into Nordic-wide ones, reduce platforms and applications, modernise legacy systems and increase engineering productivity.”
It added that the changes would make its technology more resilient and secure.
“By transforming local customer processes into Nordic‑wide value chains, and reducing, simplifying and modernising technology systems and infrastructure, Nordea will make more effective use of its Nordic scale to serve customers even better and operate more efficiently,” it told the stock exchange.
The bank said it will continue to invest in skills, but “with Nordic scale, the impact of AI and process optimisation, Nordea expects to have fewer employees in the future than today”.
It said the job cuts, about 5% of its workforce, are subject to union negotiation and consultation processes, and that it will support employees with reskilling, upskilling and other internal opportunities.
AI acceleration
Banks are increasing their adoption of AI as returns on investment grow. According to recent Lloyds Banking Group research, 59% of surveyed firms reported AI-driven productivity gains in the past 12 months, compared with 32% in the 2024 survey.
In its Financial institutions sentiment survey, it found that 21% of respondents believe AI is directly driving business growth, compared with 8% in the survey a year ago. Meanwhile, a third (33%) of respondents said AI is enhancing customer experiences, up from 14%. The same number said they have deeper customer insights through AI, compared with 18% last year.
Figures from Bloomberg Intelligence put the number of jobs set to be replaced by AI at hundreds of thousands, with CIOs questioned by the organisation expecting 3% of their staff on average to be cut. About a quarter of respondents expect the workforce to be reduced by between 5% and 10% as AI takes over roles, with the back and middle offices likely to be the most affected.
In a whitepaper titled The AI-fication of talents, published last year, the centre for finance, technology and entrepreneurship said three groups of professionals will emerge in the finance sector as a result of the widespread adoption of AI.
It reported that there will be: “mass displacement” of roles centred on execution, which will be increasingly automated; “supercharged professionals” will emerge who use AI to expand scope and scale; and “creative disruptors” will be a small group inventing new models, products and systems.
It’s not just the banking sector that faces huge change in the makeup of the workforce. According to research by OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania, roles that will be affected include accountants, legal assistants, financial analysts, journalists, translators and public relations professionals. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs published figures in March 2023 that spoke of 300 million jobs exposed to AI across all sectors.
