RBS to cut 880 IT jobs in London, union says

Royal Bank of Scotland has set out plans to cut 40% of permanent IT staff and 65% of contractor roles in London by 2020, totalling 880 job cuts, according to union reports.

In 2016 RBS employed 2,200 IT staff but by 2020 there will be just 950 full time staff, the Unite said on Tuesday.

Ross McEwan, chief executive said alongside results this month that branch and head office job losses were inevitable as the pace of technological change and the number of customers using digital banking meant it was inevitable that the branch network would shrink further.

Earlier this year it was reported by The Times, but denied by the bank, that RBS was looking to axe around 15,000 jobs as it looks to cut costs, with further branch closures and redundancies at its main offices in Edinburgh and London, with the bank revealing in March that it would close a further 158 branches, resulting in job changes or redundancies for almost 1,000 staff.

But IT cuts may come as a surprise as three years ago, the Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority fined RBS and its NatWest and Ulster Bank subsidiaries £56m for the computer failures that hit more than over 6.5m UK customers for several weeks in 2012.

And in 2015 a technical glitch at RBS meant customers were unable to receive payments including disability allowance and tax credits, with some 600,000 transactions affected its NatWest, Ulster Bank and Coutts banks.

Unite called RBS's "fixation" on reducing staff headcount and offshoring jobs "wholly unacceptable", coming on the back of an announcement last year for 600 staff cuts.

RBS had been contacted for comment but had not yet replied at the time of publication.

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