JP Morgan Chase laid off hundreds of employees from its home lending division on Wednesday. The exact number was not confirmed by the company, but it said that this is a natural process of reviewing “business and customer requirements and adapting staff accordingly. This includes creating new roles when we see the need, or reducing existing positions when necessary. “We continue to hire in many areas and work hard for redeployment of impacted employees. A Chase spokeswoman stated that the company has added more than 22,000 jobs in the past year. According to the number of employees affected, mortgage professionals were laid off in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Arizona. Bloomberg was the first to report on the layoffs. The publication stated that the reductions were due to lower industry volumes, and included some managers. It should not be surprising that the bank’s mortgage department will be restructured. Daniel Pinto, the company’s Chief Operative Officer, suggested that if investment banking revenues continue to decline, reductions in headcount or compensation could be imminent. “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. Wells stated that the move will reduce risk in the mortgage industry by reducing its size, and narrowing its focus. A spokesperson for Wells declined to provide any details about the company’s wind-down or reduction of its servicing portfolio.