266 Saxo Bank employees gathered at 9:30am, told to leave.
Managing growth is always difficult, but it is also a lot more enjoyable than managing in a time of austerity. And with a prolonged downturn in Forex trading volumes worldwide, some of the world’s leading FX firms are feeling the pinch and need to deal with issues they’ve never faced before — such as cutting costs.
So it is not too surprising that Saxo Bank, one of the world’s five largest retail FX firms (and a member of LeapRate’s Approved List of global FX brokerages) decided to lay off nearly 20% of its workforce — a total of 266 people, the majority located in Saxo Bank’s Copenhagen headquarters.
Despite FX industry conditions, the layoffs were sudden, and indeed something of a surprise after just two months ago Saxo Bank spent a lot of money to take more than 1,000 of its employees from all over the world to Egypt, to celebrate Saxo Bank’s 20th anniversary with a banquet next to the pyramids. The Copenhagen Post reported that at 8am Tuesday employees were asked to gather for a 9:30am meeting at which many of them were told they would be laid off within the next few hours, which is exactly what happened. By noon, 168 had received their severance packages, and were walking out the door.
A Saxo Bank spokesperson confirmed, “We didn’t want to drag it out. Its a strategy we’d planned for ahead of time, and wanted it to be done as effectively as possible.”
For more on the global Forex industry see the LeapRate-Dow Jones Forex Industry Report.