Profit Time

The Royal Bank of Scotland axes jobs

Royal Bank of Scotland has decided to axe near about 500 jobs from its UK wealth management business, with the maximum number of pink slips handed over to the employees at the Coutts & Co, the Queen’s banker. Coutts employs about 2,600 in the UK.

RBS will fire people over the next three years while replacing outdated technology with a more modern sophisticated IT system. Its headcount now stands at 160,000.The redundancies bring the total number of roles to 23,100 removed since RBS was helped out by the taxpayer in October 2008 when it had experienced a huge crash in global stock and credit market when inflation stymied the growth and proper functioning of the major central banks

RBS employs 5,000 people in wealth management which includes 3,500 in the UK. Employees outside the UK will not be affected. Adam & Co, its Edinburgh-based operation for the wealthy, will also be feeling the pressure of job cuts.

The bank has claimed that the cuts were necessary for funding investments in the business and work towards the main aim of reducing costs across the group by £2.5 billion.

A spokesman for RBS said that they are declaring a major investment in the processes and technology in the wealth management division to help the bank deliver even better services and a greater number of choices for clients. Because of the changes, the bank is reconstituting the operations inevitably leading to unfortunate job losses.

Unite, the union, has criticized RBS’s decision of cutting jobs stating clearly that it does not believe that the introduction of and investing in new technology would inevitably result in job losses. It also mentioned that RBS should concentrate on making sure that the staff can continue to provide clients with the high levels of service generally expected from the Queen’s bank.

Tags: redundancy