Scotland to be spared deep RBS job losses
Make no mistake, things are looking pretty bad for Scotland's financial services sector, but there are signs it could get off lightly compared to the City. RBS is unlikely to cut too deep north of the border and job losses elsewhere could be (relatively) mild.
Stephen Hester, Royal Bank of Scotland's chief executive, has told all of the bank's divisions to seek cost reductions of 10-20%, which has lead some to believe this could equate to 20,000 redundancies.
In the UK as a whole, RBS employs 108,000 people, 17,800 of which are in Scotland.
The Times reckons that while some job losses are inevitable within RBS's Scottish operations, they are likely to be less severe than elsewhere in the UK.
Adam & Co, the Scottish-based wealth management subsidiary of RBS, is likely to escape cuts, as are the insurance arms - Churchill and Direct Line - which employ 1,782 people north of the border.
The majority of the job cuts that will affect Scotland are within retail and business banking, the group central functions and group manufacturing (6,134 staff which are employed to carry out bank statement processing, mortgage and insurance payments handling).
The 108 staff within the global transaction services division are also likely to be minimally affected.
But while Scottish employees may largely escape the wildly swinging axe, they've not been so lucky when it comes to bonus payouts.
Obviously, bonuses are bad at RBS across the board, but one Edinburgh-based banker in the corporate division tells us there were "zero bonuses" for all across this sector.
Elsewhere, treasury minister Lord Myners addressed Scottish Financial Enterprise the other week and claimed that the country's financial sector was "resilient" because it is more diverse than the City and less reliant on investment banking.
"There will be job losses in the financial sector," he said. "But those losses will be disproportionately higher outside Scotland."
However, job losses in the financial sector are largely blamed for a 40% upswing in unemployment over the last 10 months in Edinburgh, outlined in research by David Bell, professor of economics at Sterling University.
