By Jesús Aguado and Sinead Cruise
LONDON/MADRID (Reuters) - TSB, the UK banking arm of Spain's Banco de Sabadell is looking to cut around 300 jobs as part of a broad restructuring effort, employee union Unite told Reuters on Tuesday.
The proposed cuts, which were communicated to staff earlier on Tuesday, are expected to fall in the lender's Risk & Finance, Customer Banking and Customer Delivery teams, Unite said.
Sabadell declined to comment, while TSB said it was making changes to simplify the way it operates the business.
"These decisions are never taken lightly. Our priority is to consult with impacted colleagues to ensure they’re fully supported, maximising redeployment opportunities where we can," a spokesperson for TSB said.
Shares in Sabadell were trading 0.2% lower at 1512 GMT, against a 0.6% rise in Spain's leading index Ibex-35.
"Unite is working to support our members impacted by the announcement today," a spokesperson for the union told Reuters.
"The priority of the union is now to reduce the numbers of redundancies, discussing redeployment and re-training opportunities and seeking to ensure any redundancies are voluntary where possible."
Sabadell CEO Cesar Gonzalez-Bueno told reporters on Feb. 1 that the lender would cut jobs and close branches at TSB in a bid to reduce TSB's efficiency ratio - which measures a bank's cost-to-income - towards 60%, from 73.6% at the end of 2023.
At a group level, Sabadell reported an efficiency ratio of 42.59% at the end of 2023.
TSB separately said it had set aside 29 million pounds ($36.48 million) to cover the costs of the restructuring. At the end of 2023, TSB had 5,426 employees, down from 5,482 in 2022.
($1 = 0.7950 pounds)