Abbey IT staff fearful as bank cuts 1,000 more jobs

IT staff at high street bank Abbey are bracing themselves for more job cuts after the company announced that a further 1,000 jobs will be lost before the end of the year.

Spanish banking group Santander bought Abbey last year for £8.5bn and initially said the number of job cuts this year would be 3,000. But in its first quarter financial results this week Santander said that number is now likely to rise to 4,000.

Jose Antonio Alvarez, CFO at Santander, said: "We initially said 3,000 but we think it will be 4,000 towards the end of the year."

By the end of the first quarter Santander said 2,400 Abbey staff had been notified of their redundancy and 1,000 had left the company. Around 335 IT staff were hit by that first round of cuts announced earlier in the year.

Alvarez said Santander will also be closing an additional third Abbey call centre but has not yet identified which one.

The job cuts are part of a massive cost reduction and restructuring programme following the takeover that will see the updating of Abbey's legacy IT systems and the rollout of Santander's banking IT platform across the Abbey group.

Santander said the latest job cuts will mainly affect central and back-office functions. The internal Abbey National Group Union (ANGU), which represents 12,000 of the bank's 23,000 staff, said it expects these to come from head office groups including IT, finance and marketing.

Linda Rolphe, national secretary at ANGU, told silicon.com she expects 4,000 to be the final figure for this year but added the latest job cuts announcement has created a mood of uncertainty among staff.

"We were disappointed because we thought we had got to the end only to find we have another 1,000 cuts. It gives the staff uncertainty. People now feel it is not the end and it is unsettling. Our other concern is that the cuts will not put the remaining people under undue pressure or stress," she said.

Abbey's former CIO Bill Gibbons was one of those already affected by the restructuring, leaving the company in March.