C. S. Venkatakrishnan, the risk mathematician behind 5,000 Barclays job cuts

C. S. Venkatakrishnan

Born	1966-01 Mysore, India
Occupation	Banker

When Barclays told investors it would shed roughly one job in every twenty, its chief executive declined the easy headline. Artificial intelligence, C. S. Venkatakrishnan said, “is the icing on the cake not the cake.” The cake, in his account, is the plumbing, the rebuilt systems a bank has to own before any model can save it money. It was an engineer’s answer, and the man known across the bank and the City of London simply as Venkat is an engineer by training who built a career on measuring risk before arguing about it.

That habit is now being tested from the other side. For most of his working life Venkat was the person who told traders what could go wrong. As group chief executive he answers for what did go wrong, and in his latest quarter it was the bond trading business he once ran that let the numbers down.

He was born in January 1966 in Mysore, in the south Indian state of Karnataka, and holds American citizenship. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in operations research. His 1991 thesis analysed and optimised air traffic control operations around airports, a study of queues, congestion and systems that fail under load. It proved a fair apprenticeship for a trading floor.

He joined JPMorgan Chase in 1994 and stayed for 22 years, moving between asset management, investment banking and risk. In asset management he rose to chief investment officer for global fixed income, with responsibility for roughly $200 billion. The episode that defines his JPMorgan years came on the risk side. In 2012, shortly after he took a senior risk role, his team examined the derivatives book built up by the bank’s chief investment office in London and estimated potential losses of as much as $6.3 billion. A risk officer in that unit dismissed the work as “garbage.” The positions became known as the London Whale and lost about $6.2 billion, and a US Senate investigation later found that some of the damage could have been avoided had the warning been heeded.

In early 2016 he followed Jes Staley, a former JPMorgan colleague who had just taken over Barclays, and was among the first people Staley hired, as group chief risk officer. He kept that post until 2020, when he became head of global markets and co-president of Barclays Bank PLC, the man in charge of the trading floor. In November 2021 Staley stepped down with immediate effect after UK regulators reached preliminary findings on how he had characterised his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein to the bank. The board turned to Venkat, who spoke of taking over from his mentor with mixed emotions and promised to keep the strategy.

The inheritance proved messier than continuity implied, and the risk specialist’s first test as chief executive was a control failure. Within months Barclays discovered it had sold about $17.7 billion of securities in the United States beyond the amount it had registered to sell. The error ended in a $361 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission and a restatement of the bank’s 2021 accounts. Then, in November 2022, he disclosed that he had non-Hodgkin lymphoma, said it was curable and kept running the bank while being treated in New York, missing the presentation of the annual results. Writing in the Financial Times afterwards, he acknowledged that some had read his decision as “CEO swagger,” conceded that his position gave him a flexibility most patients do not have, and said he wished he had been “more sensitive at the outset to this perception.” He finished treatment and was in remission by March 2023.

His reply to the doubts about Barclays itself was a plan he called measured ambition, presented in February 2024 as the bank’s first full strategy update in years. It moved capital away from the investment bank, aiming to cut its share of the group’s risk-weighted assets from 63% to about half by 2026, and towards lending to British households and businesses, with about £2 billion of savings and £10 billion promised to shareholders. Within three months the shares had risen more than 40%. In November 2024 Barclays completed its purchase of Tesco’s retail banking business, a deal he described as “an important step in increasing our investment in the UK.” By February 2026, with annual pre-tax profit up 13% to £9.1 billion, he raised the target to a return on tangible equity above 14% in 2028 and at least £15 billion of distributions between 2026 and 2028. His own pay for 2025 rose to about £15 million.

The third quarter of 2026, reported on 22 October, showed both halves of that record. Pre-tax profit rose 12% to £2.3 billion, slightly short of forecasts, and a new £500 million buyback lifted the year’s returns to shareholders to £2.8 billion. Fixed income trading income fell 19%, far worse than at the big American banks. “I am disappointed and you can be sure this will get my attention,” he said. The 5,000 job cuts, around 5% of a workforce of about 93,000, fall mostly in support functions, developers among them. Barclays would not say how many of them were caused by AI, and Russ Mould of AJ Bell said the bank was “reaching for the AI lever” while its results fell short of expectations. A day later he told staff the bank would favour internal moves over outside hiring for those affected.

Outside the bank he sits on the board of the Institute of International Finance, chairs the financial services taskforce of the Sustainable Markets Initiative, serves on MIT’s CEO advisory board and is a director of FCLT Global. He is married with three daughters, raised in the New York suburbs, and divides his time between London and New York. Colleagues describe him as unflappable, with a 4:30am start to the day and a fondness for emojis that survives even a crisis.

Two deadlines now frame his tenure. The remaining 4,000 posts are due to go before the end of 2026, and the 14% return target falls due in 2028. The man who once modelled the losses nobody wanted to see will be judged on whether his own forecast holds.

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