Sberbank, which is currently Russia's largest bank, is planning to sack 45,000 employees over the course of the next eight years, the bank's CEO Herman Gref said Tuesday.

According to Gref, Sberbank will decrease the number of its workers to 280,000 by 2025. "Today we have 325,000 employees around the world, I think that 280,000 is the landmark for 2025," Gref said, adding that in 2025 Sberbank's workers would have fundamentally different structural employment.

Sberbank's CEO went on to say that the company has a program for retraining employees, noting that despite the cutbacks, the bank is actively recruiting new employees in the field of IT-technologies.

"We do cut our staff in traditional occupations, but we recruit employees for the new spheres of our business. If you look at it, in the last two years we created additional 6,500, these are the employees who develop our system," Gref said.

Turkey's DenizBank was acquired by the Russian state-controlled Sberbank in 2012 for $3.5 billion.