JPMorgan Chase makes cuts to its home lending division

JP Morgan Chase shed hundreds of employees in its home lending division Wednesday. 

The company would not confirm the exact number, but said this is a natural ebb and flow of reviewing "business and customer needs and adjusting staff accordingly."

This includes " creating new roles where we see the need or reducing positions when appropriate."

"We continue to hire in many other areas and work hard to redeploy impacted employees. In the last year alone, we added more than 22,000 jobs," a Chase spokeswoman said. 

Mortgage professionals let go were located in Wisconsin, Illinois and Arizona, per employees impacted. 

Bloomberg was the first to report the layoffs. According to the publication, reductions were tied to lower industry volumes and included some managers.

Rightsizing of the bank's mortgage division should come as no surprise. 

In September, the company's Chief Operating Officer Daniel Pinto posited that reductions in headcount and compensation could be imminent if investment banking revenue continues to decline.

"Last year, we had to add a lot of bodies just to execute the huge amount of volume we were executing," said Pinto during an investor conference hosted by Barclays.

Since then, volumes, specifically mortgage-related activity, have dipped.

As a result, most banks are in the midst of reassessing staffing needs in their mortgage departments.

Thus far, New York Community Bancorp, Citigroup, Renasant Bank and First Internet Bank have all announced that they would either be shrinking their mortgage operations.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo, still one of the largest mortgage lenders in the nation, announced that it would exit correspondent lending in early January. 

In announcing its exit from the channel, Wells noted that the measure will help to "reduce risk in the mortgage business by reducing its size and narrowing its focus." A company spokesperson declined to give a timeline for the wind-down or the reduction of its servicing portfolio.