Standard Chartered's chief executive Peter Sands moved aggressively today to reverse the Asia-focused lender's fortunes by closing the bulk of its global equities business and announcing 4,000 job losses in retail banking.
The bank said it is dismantling its stock broking, equity research, and equity listing desks worldwide.
This will lead to 200 job cuts as it exits an unprofitable business in which it had failed to build scale.
In its retail banking division, Standard Chartered said it has cut or announced the cutting of 2,000 jobs in the last three months, and plans to axe a further 2,000 over the course of this year.
The move forms part of a cost-cutting plan the bank announced last October that is targeting $400m in savings this year, as it tries to bounce back after seeing its share price slump more than 40% over the past two years.
Falling commodity prices and a slowdown in growth in many of its core emerging markets ate into Standard Chartered's earnings during 2014, with the bank hit by a surge in bad loans and rising regulatory costs.
It also took a $175m hit from a suspected commodities fraud in China's Qingdao port.
The bank said the retail job cuts should save $200m in costs this year, while the closure of the equities business should result in $100m of savings in 2016.
The cuts come less than two months after rating agency Standard & Poor's hit the London-based bank with its first ever downgrade following three profit warnings in less than 12 months and rising losses from bad loans.
Standard Chartered said in October that operating profit for the July-September quarter fell 16% to $1.5 billion in the same time a year ago.
Sands had achieved a decade of record profits up until 2013 with big bets on growing the bank's loan book in Asia and a push into commodities
But after eight years at the helm, he is increasingly coming under pressure from shareholders to revamp the bank, with some investors urging the bank to plan his successor.
Its biggest shareholders include Singapore state investor Temasek and asset managers Aberdeen Asset Management and BlackRock.
Retail banking, where Standard Chartered has more than 10 million customers in 34 countries, is a major target in its cost-cutting plan with the lender planning to focus more on just its 1.6 million priority retail customers and 400,000 business clients.
Other global banks such as HSBC and Citigroup have been making cuts to their retail banking businesses in recent years, exiting inefficient markets and trying to focus more on online services rather than bricks-and- mortar branches.
Standard Chartered launched its equities business in November 2008 when it acquired brokerage Cazenove from JPMorgan. The division includes cash equities, research and underwriting, all of which the bank said are unprofitable.
It failed to rank among the top ten banks globally for research or trading at the end of 2013, according to a survey by Greenwich Associates, and ranked just 23rd last year in equity underwriting in Asia Pacific according to Thomson Reuters data.
The decision to exit equities marks a reversal in strategy for the bank, which had been hiring staff in the division as recently as October last year.
Standard Chartered would be one of the first global banks to completely exit the equity capital markets business, which involves underwriting stock offerings for companies.
The move comes despite a boom in equity underwritings in Asia that saw fees for the industry rise 74% in 2014 after a three-year decline.
Standard Chartered said it would retain its equity derivatives business as well as its convertible bond and macro economic research units.
