India’s biggest public-sector bank State Bank of India (SBI) has reduced its headcount by around 6000, as part of voluntary retirement scheme and regular retirement policy. The bank which had an employee count of 2.80 lakhs during last quarter holds 2.73 employees by end of that quarter.

It is more likely that layoffs would continue in SBI and employee retirements in 2017-18 financial year will bring down the workforce by 15,460. Other than that, digitalization and merger of associate banks are expected to show its impact on 10,000 employees. However, the bank said it will redeploy around 10,000 employees from administrative offices and associate banks and assign them to sales functions.

Till 6th of August, SBI has officially merged 594 branches and rationalized 122 administrative offices and that will help the bank to save Rs 1,160 Crores. Besides SBI, private giants like HDFC and ICICI Banks are also letting their employees to leave the company by pushing the digital payments among customers.

According a recent report, HDFC bank had a work force of 90,421 in December-2016 but it’s now reduced to 84,325.