By Scott Wright

ROYAL Bank of Scotland is to slash up to 90 jobs across the Atlantic as part of the continuing revamp of its investment banking operation.

The bank is cutting between 80 and 90 jobs at its US head office in Stamford, Connecticut, where its NatWest Markets (NWM) division employs around 400 people. An unspecified number of redundancies are also being considered across Asia under plans to trim NWM’s headcount outside the UK by 20% to 30%.

The cuts are the latest at NWM since Royal Bank revealed in February that it would undertake an overhaul of the division to reduce the size of the business by around one half, and refocus on corporate and institutional customers. Around 130 redundancies were subsequently made in March and April.

Robert Begbie was installed as permanent chief executive of NWM, which employs around 5,000 people, earlier this month.

The bank said yesterday: “These are always difficult decisions, but we intend to make NWM a more sustainable business and will be supporting our colleagues through this process. Where we are restructuring, we will seek to mitigate impacts for employees, which includes delaying exits in many cases and continuing to pay employees until 30 September 2020.”