Ron O'Hanley and Cliff Asness are both significantly trimming their teams this year.

Ronald Philip O'Hanley State Street Corporation CEO

Yesterday O'Hanley, the former State Street Global Advisors (SSgA) [profile] chief who rose to CEO of all State Street Corp. on January 1, started cutting 15 percent of the Boston-based institutional bank's senior management team, Bloomberg reports, citing unnamed sources. O'Hanley appears to be making on his reported declaration last month that State Street needs to "structurally compress" its senior management team, which according to Bloomberg includes hundreds of people (EVPs and SVPs). The firm has more than 30,000 employees in total, and its stock fell 35 percent in 2018.

Clifford Scott Asness AQR Capital Management Managing and Founding Principal

It's not clear how the State Street cuts will specifically affect SSgA. A State Street spokesman declined to comment to Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, longtime AQR Capital Management [profile] chief is also reportedly cutting jobs, though without specifically targeting senior management, it seems. Asness will cut "a low single-digit percentage of the workforce" in "firm-wide reductions," Bloomberg reports, citing an unnamed source. As of the end of September, AQR had more than 1,000 employees and $226 billion in AUM, so the cuts could affect dozens. In Asness' own words, AQR has "done lousily" lately when it comes to performance.

"At AQR, we have experienced record headcount growth over the past three years, including 2018," the company said in a statement to Bloomberg. "Recent small reductions in headcount reflect the need to balance our workforce growth with the current needs of our business." 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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