RBS will slash thousands of jobs next week
ROYAL Bank of Scotland is expected to announce tens of thousands of job cuts next Thursday as part of plans to reduce its cost base.
The move comes as part of a retrenchment of RBS spearheaded by chief executive Ross McEwan, who took the helm in October, and said he wanted to cut the group’s cost base, reducing its cost to income percentage target to the mid-50s from its current 65 per cent level.
The cost-cutting plan is understood to have been dubbed “Project Cook” internally.
The job cuts come after RBS has already reduced its workforce by more than a quarter from the 161,000 staff that it employed in 2008, when the government injected £37bn into the struggling bank.
The announcement will come as part of the bank’s annual results on 27 February, which RBS has warned will report a significant loss for 2013 after it took up to £4.5bn of impairments in the fourth quarter.
Analysts expect that the bank’s total losses for the year will be between £7bn and £8bn.
RBS declined to comment on upcoming job cuts.