RBS bank sheds another 900 jobs in cost-cutting drive

Royal Bank of Scotland is cutting another 900 jobs as part of plans to reduce costs by £800m this year.

The lender, majority owned by the UK government, has axed more than 2,500 jobs since January.
RBS has been reducing the scale of its international operations to focus on the UK and Ireland.

BBC Scotland business editor Douglas Fraser said unions made news about the cuts public after staff had been informed.

He said the job cuts will be in back office and technology operations, with some of the IT jobs affecting staff in Scotland.

The bank chose not to announce the staff reductions to the public, but confirmed they were taking place.

RBS’s total UK workforce is down to 64,000, with the total worldwide at 89,000. When the bank was bailed out at the height of the global financial meltdown eight years ago it had about 180,000 staff.

A spokeswoman for the bank said: As RBS becomes a smaller UK-focused bank, we are restructuring our support services to better align with the business we are becoming. These changes unfortunately mean some job losses.

‘We understand how difficult this is for our staff and will be offering as much support as we can, including redeployment to other roles where possible.’

Most RBS job cuts have fallen on its branch network, where the bank had previously announced plans to cut about one in every 10 jobs in 2016.

There have been reports that more cuts are expected to be announced in the coming months.