USAA confirmed that it has laid off 220 employees this week, calling it a “necessary adjustment” to its workforce.
Since 2022, when the financial services and insurance giant experienced its first loss in company history, USAA has laid off more than 1,200 workers.
“USAA continues to make necessary adjustments to run a healthy business and provide members with exceptional service and competitive prices,” said spokesman Roger Wildermuth in a statement. “USAA continues to hire, including approximately 2,900 jobs filled so far this year, but this reprioritization is necessary due to changing business needs.”
Wildermuth said the 2,900 hires across USAA’s workforce include filling existing roles and internal hires. With attrition, the company’s overall workforce has remained at about 37,000 nationwide.
Of those, roughly 19,000 work in San Antonio, where the company is headquartered. Wildermuth declined to say where the layoffs had occurred. He said those who have been laid off “are treated with care and compassion and provided with assistance to find new roles inside and outside of the organization.”
Employee feedback
USAA recently rolled out a dedicated Slack channel for employee feedback, to “better understand your experiences at work.” The Voice of the Employee program will use artificial intelligence to see “top feedback themes and sentiment associated with those themes,” according to screenshots of the Slack channel shared with the San Antonio Report.
The company has struggled in recent years with a challenging economy as well as being hit with millions in fines and penalties due to regulatory compliance issues.
A $140 million penalty in 2022 for what the U.S. Treasury’s financial crimes enforcement division called “willful violations” of the Bank Secrecy Act. In 2020 the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency fined USAA $85 million for unsound banking practices that did not adequately protect customers.
USAA reported a $1.3 billion net loss for 2022 in last year’s annual report, down from a $3.3 billion profit in 2021, and just over $36 billion in revenue in 2022, a 3% decline from the previous year. The company’s net worth dropped to $27.4 billion in 2022 from $40 billion.
USAA has not yet released its annual report covering 2023.
Insurance customers continue to feel the pinch of rising premiums. According to according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, USAA insurance rates rose 14.7% over last year.
“We recognize the stress on family budgets, and we don’t take lightly the decision to raise rates,” wrote CEO Wayne Peacock in the latest annual report.
Peacock was paid at least $8.1 million in 2023 from five USAA insurance companies, an increase of more than two-thirds of his 2022 compensation of $4.8 million. He was paid $1.9 million in 2021, according to the Nebraska Department of Insurance, which requires all insurance companies that do business in the state to report executive compensation annually.
