HAMILTON, Bermuda — Butterfield Bank, the island’s oldest and second largest bank, has laid off 25 employees, blaming a sluggish economy for the cuts. The bank, which has branches in the Cayman Islands, Barbados and the Bahamas among its six overseas operations, announced the “painful” cuts as it restructures to trim costs.
The job losses were spread out across departments and levels of seniority, executives told reporters. The highest-ranking employee to go was a vice-president.
“This is a painful day for the bank,” Butterfield’s chief executive officer Brad Kopp said.
“This is a bank that prides itself on its long-term employees. It’s a like a family, so this has been very difficult.”
The numbers of Bermudians and non-Bermudians let go were proportionally similar to the bank’s workforce as a whole, Kopp said.
He added that fewer than 10 per cent of the bank’s 700-strong workforce in Bermuda were work permit holders.
The CEO said business conditions were difficult and bosses felt the company needed to be “right-sized” according to its revenues.
There were no plans to make further redundancies, Kopp added.
The bank had cleaned up its balance sheet and secured new investment over the past two years and the next stage was to start making money again, he added.
“Over the last two years we have used attrition to bring down our workforce and we have asked 60 people to leave in other jurisdictions,” Kopp said.
The bank’s overseas jurisdictions include the United Kingdom. The group employed 1,519 people at the end of 2010.
Last year, Butterfield posted a net loss of US$207 million, driven mainly by selling off the troublesome investments tied to US residential mortgages that had caused huge losses at the bank over the past three years as the American housing market plummeted.
Last year a group of new investors pumped $550 million into the bank, which helped it back to stability. (CMC)
