Edward Jones job cuts and buyouts hit 811 employees

As expected, Edward Jones announced job cuts this week, laying off 259 home office associates in the United States and Canada, according to a statement from the company Thursday morning.

Those layoffs are on top of 552 home office associates earlier this year that chose to accept a voluntary separation plan, commonly known as a buyout, according to the company.

In total, this impacted less than 2% of Edward Jones' total full- and part-time workforce. No financial advisors or branch office team workers were laid off, according to the company.

"Through these programs, the firm streamlined its U.S. and Canadian operations and created the foundation for a more effective home office,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.

The St. Louis Business Journal on Friday was first to publish the news about the job cuts at the giant retail brokerage, with more than 20,000 financial advisors.

With $2.3 trillion in client assets, Edward Jones is one of the largest wealth management and investment advice companies in operation. The company in March said it was cutting home office workers at its St. Louis headquarters as a result of a companywide restructuring.

Edward Jones did not break out the layoff number by location, according to the St. Louis Business Journal article.

The company had 5,446 employees in the St. Louis area as of early 2024 – a decline of 21% since early 2019, according to Business Journal research.

Employees received notice Monday and Tuesday that they were losing their jobs, the Business Journal reported. The company did not release information about severance payment costs or the number of home office associates who were transferred to other jobs as part of the restructuring and how many saw pay cuts.

Edward Jones conducts its "home office operations" from two campuses, in the St. Louis area and one in Tempe, Arizona, and has a Canada home office in Mississauga, Ontario, according to the Business Journal.

The 9,455 home office employees as of June 27 were located in all 50 states and in five provinces of Canada. Edward Jones has roughly 55,000 full- and part-time employees in its total workforce across the United States and Canada, a company spokesperson said Friday.

Managing Partner Penny Pennington said in an April interview with the Business Journal that Edward Jones needed to make sure that the investment in home office employees enables it to “innovate with speed and agility.”

“That will result in a home office restructuring…All of that is not in order to cut costs and put those savings in the pockets of shareholders,” she told the Business Journal at the time.

Pennington said in the Business Journal interview that she wanted to be transparent about reducing the number of employees and realized that creates some uncertainty among employees.

Employees posting on social media criticized the job cuts and how they were carried out, saying the wait over the past several months about the fate of their jobs was painful. Some of them turned the "Enterprise Reimagined" into a verb, saying they had been "reimagined" out of a job without adequate notice, according to the Business Journal.