Bank of America Confirms Recent Layoffs

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Bank of America(BAC) confirmed Friday it had begun layoffs, part of a plan previously announced by CEO Brian Moynihan to eliminate 30,000 jobs at the bank "over the next few years."

"Bank of America continually reviews and assesses the efficiency and effectiveness of our operations. As a result, we have made the difficult but necessary decision to eliminate certain staff support functions in technology and operations," read an emailed statement from the bank. A spokeswoman declined to elaborate.

According to Bank of America's latest 10-K, global technology and operations is not a sales-oriented division but, like the office of the CFO, human resources and legal, it is an "enterprise control function," meaning that it has to do with "risk governance and control," functions such as "setting policies, standards and limits; providing risk reporting; monitoring for systemic risk issues"

Rochdale Securities analyst Dick Bove was not overly impressed by these cuts.

He hopes they are not related to risk management because, "their risk management sucks; their loan losses should tell you that." If, on the other hand, the functions are more mundane, they are not much to get excited about, according to Bove.

Infrastructure and support systems "always get cut back when you're reducing the size of an entity in trouble," Bove says, however, he adds "that's not where they're going to get the big savings in people. It's getting rid of the whole foreclosure group, selling business lines. That's how you really cut people effectively, not taking 10% of the people who work in the mailroom."

Bank of America has sold a host of businesses over the past year, most recently unwinding a stake in China Construction Bank, selling Spanish and Canadian credit card portfolios and announcing it will unload its U.K. credit card business. It has also sold its correspondent and wholesale mortgage businesses, among other moves.

-- Written by Dan Freed in New York. Follow this writer on twitter.

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