HUMAN CAPITAL PULSE: BANKING · ISSUE 3 · MARCH 2026
A monthly Human Capital benchmark for HR and People leaders in Banking: the sector's talking points and how culture, workforce and talent compare across your peers, built on Deltabase data covering 5,500+ companies and 11M employee reviews.
Editor's note
March showed two sides of banking reward. Wall Street's bonus pool hit a record, even as Goldman Sachs moved to rolling job cuts and HSBC weighed removing around 20,000 roles over several years. Pay is rising for those who stay and the bar for staying is rising too. For People teams, the useful question is whether employees see reward as fair: Pay & Rewards sentiment fell at half of the ten Top 100 banks we track in 2025.
Leroy Hall, Deltabase
The month in three
1. Goldman Sachs swaps its annual cull for rolling cuts
What happened: PYMNTS, citing Business Insider, reported on 19 March that Goldman Sachs is replacing its single spring Strategic Resource Assessment with cuts set by business-line leaders, expected in several rounds from April and through the summer across all business lines.
The Deltabase lens: Workforce: Goldman already has the highest churn in our banking set. Deltabase Employee Turnover data shows average monthly turnover of 2.00% in 2025, ranging from 1.21% in November to 4.39% in August, against 0.94% at JPMorgan Chase. Culture: Its Empowered NSS fell from −0.8% to −20.4% in 2025 (1,912 reviews), though it remains the best score among ten banks.
So what: Rolling cuts spread uncertainty across the year; watch sentiment and voluntary exits in teams not yet affected.
2. HSBC weighs around 20,000 job cuts over three to five years
What happened: Reuters, citing Bloomberg, reported on 19 March that HSBC is considering cuts that could eventually affect about 20,000 roles, roughly 10% of its workforce, with non-client-facing roles in global service centres hit hardest. HSBC had 208,720 full-time equivalent staff at the end of 2025. No final decisions have been made.
The Deltabase lens: Workforce: Operations and General Admin functions together account for 10.3% of HSBC's workforce. Talent: 5.2% of its people list transformation skills, against 2.8% at Bank of America. Culture: Agility & Bureaucracy NSS improved from −86.1% to −77.4% in 2025.
So what: Multi-year programmes give HR time to plan redeployment; start by mapping which skills in affected functions transfer.
3. Wall Street's bonus pool hits a record $49.2bn
What happened: New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli estimated on 26 March that Wall Street's bonus pool rose 9% to a record $49.2bn in 2025, with the average bonus up 6% to $246,900, while industry employment slipped to 198,200 from 201,500.
The Deltabase lens: Culture: Pay & Rewards NSS diverged among US banks in 2025: it rose to +47.5% at Wells Fargo and +41.6% at JPMorgan Chase, but fell from +34.7% to +29.0% at Bank of America and from +23.9% to +18.0% at Goldman Sachs.
So what: Bigger pots do not guarantee better sentiment; how reward is explained matters as much as its size.
Stat of the month
+30.3%: median Pay & Rewards NSS across ten Top 100 banks in 2025, down from +33.6% in 2024, with five of the ten slipping.
| Company | Culture: Pay & Rewards NSS, 2024 | Culture: Pay & Rewards NSS, 2025 | Workforce: avg monthly turnover, Jan–Feb 2026 |
|---|
| Lloyds Banking Group | +44.0% | +55.4% | 0.66% |
| Wells Fargo | +44.6% | +47.5% | 0.69% |
| JPMorgan Chase | +39.8% | +41.6% | 0.53% |
| Barclays | +36.6% | +31.6% | 0.48% |
| Goldman Sachs | +23.9% | +18.0% | 1.15% |
| NatWest Group | −6.8% | −11.1% | 0.43% |
Source: Deltabase Culture data, Employee Net Sentiment Score (−100% to +100%), 2024 and 2025; sector median of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest Group and Standard Chartered. Deltabase Employee Turnover data, average monthly turnover January–February 2026.
Spotlight: JPMorgan Chase vs Goldman Sachs
Two Wall Street names with very different employee experiences. On Culture, JPMorgan Chase scored +4.8% in 2025 (5,129 reviews) against −10.3% at Goldman Sachs (1,912). Goldman leads on Learning & Development (+76.9% against +61.1%) but trails badly on Work-Life Balance (−65.9% against −9.3%). On Talent, Goldman's workforce is more technical: 16.2% list Python and 6.6% machine learning, against 9.8% and 4.0% at JPMorgan Chase, where 16.3% of the workforce sits in Tech (Goldman has no Deltabase Workforce data). People leave Goldman faster: median tenure is 3.4 years against 4.4, and average monthly turnover in January–February 2026 was 1.15% against 0.53%.
For your People team
- Before bonus communications, check Pay & Rewards NSS by grade and function, not just in total.
- If cuts move to a rolling model, track monthly turnover in unaffected teams to catch regretted exits early.
- Prepare UK gender pay gap narratives alongside bonus outcomes, so the two stories are consistent.
See how your Human Capital compares with your Banking peers. Book a 30-minute benchmark walkthrough across culture, workforce and talent. Book a walkthrough →
Sources: PYMNTS, citing Business Insider (19 March 2026); Reuters via Daily Maverick (19 March 2026); Reuters via BNN Bloomberg (26 March 2026); Deltabase Culture data; Deltabase Workforce data; Deltabase Talent data; Deltabase Employee Turnover data.