Dive Brief:

• After the bank’s headcount remained neutral in 2025, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said Wednesday he expects its employee total to drop this year.
• The Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender, which has had about 213,000 employees for the past two years, has leaned into artificial intelligence capabilities in recent years. With expense discipline in mind, “the No. 1 thing,” Moynihan said during the bank’s fourth-quarter earnings call, is “work the headcount through operational excellence and applications of new technologies, including AI.” 
• Citi and Wells Fargo are also projecting job cuts this year. Citi CEO Jane Fraser, in a Wednesday memo to employees seen by Bloomberg, said the “bar is raised” for working at the bank. “I expect to see the last vestiges of old, bad habits fall away, and a more disciplined, more confident, winning Citi emerge in 2026,” Fraser wrote. 

Dive Insight:

Bank of America brought on about 17,000 new employees in 2025, to fill roles that were vacated. “Every time someone leaves, we take the opportunity to evaluate whether the role needs to be replaced,” the bank’s CFO, Alastair Borthwick, said Wednesday. 

BofA notched productivity improvements through AI and digitalization last year, enabling the bank to add client-facing employees while eliminating operational support work and roles, Borthwick said. 

Moynihan pointed to the bank’s audit team as an example where an AI-powered capability that’s been built could result in a smaller team. The unit had grown in recent years to handle “the regulatory onslaught,” Moynihan said. 

BofA also added 2,000 new college graduates last year, executives noted. Headcount is the bank’s top expense driver. 

“If you look at the expense load, it comes from people and it comes from the benefits and compensation, and it ultimately comes from the buildings and computer systems to allow them to do the great job for clients,” Moynihan said. “So that's what we're working on.”

In its consumer segment, the bank has cut headcount by nearly half over the past 15 years – from 101,000 in 2011 to 55,000 today, executives said during a November investor day.

The bank spends about $13 billion on technology annually, with about $4 billion allocated to new initiatives. That includes “several hundred million dollars” on AI investments, with some 20 different projects in process across the company, such as the audit team example, Moynihan said. 

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf on Wednesday said the San Francisco-based bank has more tools to achieve greater efficiency than it ever has, “especially with AI.” 

The lender’s headcount has dropped by about 25% since the second quarter of 2020, he said as the bank reported earnings Wednesday. 

Wells ended 2025 with about 205,000 employees, and $612 million in severance costs led to higher expenses in the fourth quarter of the year. 

Scharf said in December he expected the bank would have fewer employees heading into this year. He called the long-term impact of AI on the bank’s headcount “extremely significant” and said the lender aims to “use attrition as our friend.” 

At Citi, CFO Mark Mason buttressed Fraser’s memo, saying the bank has made headway on its plan to trim 20,000 jobs by the end of this year and added he expects a further decline in headcount in 2026 and subsequent years. 

Fraser, for her part, noted the bank’s progress on resolving regulatory issues, adding that completion of those tasks may result in some roles being eliminated.

Clarification: This story’s headline was updated to better reflect the comments made.