By Vladimir Guevarra Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES LONDON -(Dow Jones)- U.K. banking group HSBC Holdings PLC (HBC) said Tuesday it is cutting 1,700 jobs in the U.K., mostly from its collections and credit-card operations, in a move that adds to the worsening unemployment in the U.K. financial services industry. The move comes just a day after Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC (RBS) said that it planned to cut about 3,700 jobs across its retail operations in the U.K. "It's a fairly broad restructure across the business. Most of the roles are coming from the consolidation of our collections and credit-card operations," a bank spokesman said. Nine offices across the country that are being used by those two businesses will be consolidated into two offices in Birmingham over the next 12-18 months. Some jobs will also be cut in a division that looks after the bank's network of branches in the country. After the cuts, HSBC will have around 40,000 staff in the country. The latest cuts from HSBC come after the bank announced 1,200 job cuts in March and 500 job cuts in December last year. "Decisions that affect our people are always difficult, but this restructure is an essential part of the streamlining of our business and the migration of activities into centers of excellence around the country," HSBC U.K. Chief Executive Paul Thurston said. "We will do everything we can to support those of our people who are directly affected and to minimize the number of redundancies. We have a good track record of redeployment and we will make every effort to maintain it," Thurston said. Data from the Office for National Statistics show that some 33,400 finance-related jobs were cut last year, bringing the sector's employment figure to close to 1.03 million at end-December. Company Web site: www.hsbc.com By Vladimir Guevarra, Dow Jones Newswires. Tel. +44 (0) 2078429486, vladimir.guevarra@dowjones.com
