Exclusive..Mass Sack Hit Zenith Bank..Fin Bank

While Finbank Plc sacked over 500 staff today and closed several of its branches in Lagos ,Zenith Bank Plc has commenced a staff restructuring exer-cise as hundreds of work-ers were laid off. Sources close to the bank told National Mir-ror that the sack affected 240 senior managers of the bank. The exercise, which began on Monday, in-volved a readjustment of the structure of the bank’s 8,000-strong staff strength and created about 240 redundancies at the senior management level where Zenith Bank is known to have been in-curring heavy costs.
It was gathered that the affected senior staff accepted the bank’s of-fer of financial pay-off to resign.
Zenith was one of the few banks that did not lay off staff during the financial meltdown that threw many into the job market.Zenith Bank, according to its last financial re-sults has 24 general man-agers, 30 deputy general managers and 72 assis-tant general managers, one of the highest figures of staff at this level.As a result of the un-usually high number of such category of staff, the bank’s total expenditure on staff is also one of the highest in the banking in-dustry.
For instance, Zenith Bank’s financial state-ment for the year ended December 31, 2011 showed that salaries and wages (excluding executive di-rectors) rose by N7.22bn to total of N36.87bn in 2011, from N29.65bn in 2010.Within the same pe-riod, the bank’s total expenditure including pension contribution, salaries and wages and other staff cost rose by N10.82bn to N44.61bn last year, compared with the N33.8bn in 2010.
Sources in the bank said the high wage bill at senior management level was unsustainable“Maintaining an un-necessarily high num-ber of senior staff has a way of impacting on the bottom line and the present MD must be com-mended for his courage in tackling this area,” the source, added.
Group Managing Di-rector/Chief Executive Officer, Zenith Bank Plc, Mr. Godwin Emefiele, had at the last Annual general meeting of the bank, as-sured stakeholders that the bank would continue to leverage its “heritage of excellent people, sound business model and ex-perienced management team to create pioneering solutions that surpasses our stakeholders’ expec-tations.”