British bank does major restructuring
Britain's Abbey National has told more than a quarter of its existing branch staff to reapply for jobs with the group.
The move - part of a major overhaul at Britain's sixth largest bank - affects 2,000 of its 7,200 branch-based staff.
Under restructuring plans, the traditional role of branch manager is to make a comeback but titles such as local market manager - similar to the new branch role - local sales manager and client manager are to go.
Holders of those posts have been told to apply for the new positions or other new roles within the branch network.
As well as appointing managers to its 743 branches, Abbey National is to create assistant manager roles at its 150 biggest sites.
A spokeswoman for the bank said: "It's possible that not everybody who applies for a job in the restructuring will get one but we expect redundancies to be kept to a minimum."
She added that the group was also creating 450 new jobs in its branch network.
The move comes as part of renewed focus on personal finance following a major re-think at the bank after it ran up pre-tax losses of £984m (€1.4bn) in 2002 against profits of £1.47bn (€2.1bn) the previous year.
Announcing the figures in February, Abbey National revealed plans to trim down its operations to focus on its core UK personal financial services business.
The move includes the sell-off of almost all of its international and wholesale operations but the bank also aims to slash costs in its personal financial services business by £200m (€208m) a year.
