The entrance to a bank branch in Sin el-Fil, in the eastern suburbs of Beirut. (Credit: PHB)
The workforce of Lebanon’s financial sector, which once provided jobs with decent salaries and incentives, has significantly shrunk since the start of the crisis.
With many quitting and others getting laid off, banks and other financial institutions have lost at least 35 percent of their employees since late 2019. The number of employees was cut to 17,000 at the end of 2022, according to figures provided by Banque du Liban (BDL) and reported by Byblos Bank’s weekly magazine, Lebanon This Week.
More than 26,000 were still employed nearly four years ago. The number declined by 12.2 percent compared with 2021.
Of the remaining employees, more than 95 percent work in the banking sector, including 15,537 in commercial banks (91.5 percent of the total) and 661 in investment banks (3.9 percent of the total).
The remaining 776 are employed in other financial institutions licensed by BDL, particularly brokerage firms or microcredit organizations.
Georges al-Hajj, president of the Federation of Syndicates of Bank Employees, said this decline did not ramp up during the first six months of 2023. However, he added that he does not have complete and up-to-date information on the situation.
A banking source who requested anonymity said the number of employees that left their jobs voluntarily and those laid off continues to rise. According to this source, “several major banks” regularly offer employees they want to lay off “financial packages,” or have continued to dismiss groups of employees from time to time.
According to the same source, the number of remaining employees currently stands at around 14,000.
Some banks have even asked some of their employees to stay home, while continuing to pay them a salary, and a handful of small banks were placed under the supervision of BDL at the end of last year for rehabilitation.
More women in commercial banks
BDL provided details on the financial sector’s remaining employees at the end of 2022:
- 47.9 percent of them are women (8,132 people). This percentage is higher in commercial banks (48.7 percent);
- 1.3 percent of the total number of employees are general managers, deputy general managers and assistant general managers, totaling 232 people across the sector;
- The number of employees fell by an average of 11.7 percent each year between the end of 2019 and the end of 2022.
Long considered the linchpin of the Lebanese economy, especially at the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990, the Lebanese financial sector was one of the main catalysts of the economic crisis that has gripped Lebanon for the past four years.
During this four year period, banks illegally imposed restrictions on withdrawals from foreign currency accounts, with the complicity of the authorities, while the lira collapsed and lost 98 percent of its value.
Despite being considered inevitable by the International Monetary Fund since 2020, the restructuring of the banking sector has not yet started.
The number of employees in the sector does not in principle include employees of subsidiaries of Lebanese financial institutions abroad. The balance sheets of the latter have been separated from that of their parent companies (like in cases where shareholders of the parent company retained control over subsidiaries via a holding company).
This article was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour. Translation by Joelle El Khoury.