Wells Fargo is trimming its workforce, joining a group that includes Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Truist.

The San Francisco-based lender could see its headcount drop further as it tries to improve efficiency, Wells Fargo chief financial officer Mike Santomassimo said while speaking at the Barclays Global Financial Services Conference Tuesday, according to Reuters.

Wells Fargo began reducing its workforce since the third quarter of 2020 and has culled its employee base by roughly 40,000, with more cuts on the horizon, Santomassimo said.

"We continue to believe we've got a lot more to do to make the company as efficient as it should be," he said Tuesday. "I'm not suggesting it's going to be down every quarter forever, but I do think that there's more to do and you'll see that through the headcount number," Santomassimo added.

He also pointed out that Wells saw a visible change in attrition rates since last fall, prompting the lender to turn to layoffs and severance packages to keep the headcount down, San Francisco Business Times reported. He predicts the lender might see more savings as it also reduces its real estate requirements.

"We had too much real estate before COVID, and so we've been methodically working through that portfolio over the last few years," Santomassimo noted. "We still have more to do there.”

Wells Fargo also reduced its mortgage-lending workforce last year. 

The lender had 233,834 employees at the end of the second quarter this year compared to 243,674 in the same quarter last year, according to Reuters.

Santomassimo’s statement follows Truist CEO Bill Rogers' announcement Monday of the lender's plan to make "sizeable reductions" to its workforce over the next three quarters as the bank gears up to save $750 million in its gross costs in the next 12 to 18 months.

Barclays also grabbed headlines with its two-pronged headcount reduction plans this week. The lender is cutting roughly 450 employees in its domestic business while separately planning to dismiss approximately 5% of its client-facing staff in its trading division as part of its annual effort to trim underperformers.

Meanwhile, Goldman announced last week that it is preparing to cut between 1% and 5% of its workers, listed as bottom performers, as soon as late October, the Financial Times reported.

Wells Fargo increased its allowance for credit losses by $949 million to account for the potential losses in office loans last quarter, according to Reuters. It is still operating under an asset cap that prevents it from growing until regulators give a go-ahead that it has fixed its issues related to the fake-accounts scandal. Wells had nine open consent orders from banking regulators and requires added supervision of its practices, according to the wire service.

Though Santomassimo did not say whether the asset cap might be lifted, he assured that Wells Fargo is working to resolve its internal issues.