Société Générale (SocGen) has unveiled a new strategy focused on dramatically reducing its costs, improving its growth, and accelerating the transformation of business processes.

SocGen is targeting €1.9 ‌billion in savings by ⁠2029, with between €500 million to €600 million of this through AI adoption. The bank said approximately €350 million of these savings have already been identified.

In its strategy presentation, the bank expanded on this goal by predicting that it can reduce coding costs by more than 30 per cent using AI, simplify half of its end-to-end processes to achieve a productivity gain of 20 per cent or more, and automate 40 per cent of its customer calls using AI assistants.

As part of this goal, the bank has signed a deal with Anthropic with the intention of rolling out the firm’s frontier Claude models throughout its workforce.

Slawomir Krupa, chief executive of SocGen, said that the bank has already dramatically simplified its processes and “strengthened its discipline” since he became its leader in 2023.

“This success, which is the result of the collective work of the entire company, creates a sense of shared pride and reinforces a sense of ongoing responsibility for our common future,” he said.

“Today, we are entering a new phase. Our ambition is clear: to accelerate our profitable growth and maintain rigorous risk and cost discipline. This will enable us to achieve high profitability, offer new opportunities to our teams, increase our capacity to support the growth of our clients, and offer an attractive distribution policy.”

Krupa separately told the Financial Times that he does not think AI will have a transformative effect on the financial services industry in the short-term due to the impact of regulators. He told the publication that banks are “so regulated and so supervised” that AI-driven disruption across the sector would be delayed.

In addition to its projections of the positive impact AI could have on costs, SocGen plans to cut IT procurement costs by $400 million and IT spending by $500 million. The bank added it forecasts lower employee spending by 2029 as a result of “natural attrition”.

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