(FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 2/27/15) 
   By Margot Patrick in London, Daniel Huang in Stamford, Conn., and Katy Burne in New York 

Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC said Thursday it will dismantle its global investment bank, including cutting more than 1,000 investment-banking jobs in the U.S.

The move is a blow to Stamford, Conn., which not long ago aspired to be a trading center 50 miles north of Wall Street but has seen a number of firms retreat in recent years.

The pullback highlights the changing fortunes of the fixed-income trading businesses that once contributed disproportionately to the revenue of the world's largest banks but in recent years have petered out. UBS AG has retrenched from fixed income, while Barclays PLC, Deutsche Bank AG and Nomura Holdings have de-emphasized parts of that business.

RBS shares sank 4.1% after Chief Executive Ross McEwan said he would take radical measures to make the bank smaller and safer.

Mr. McEwan's plans include exiting from corporate- and investment-banking operations in about two dozen locations, including Hong Kong and Australia. The bank will retain only London, Stamford and Singapore for full-service sales and trading, which mainly will serve Western European companies and financial firms.

"This is a plan for a smaller, more focused, but ultimately more valuable bank with the vast majority of its assets in the U.K., and for RBS marks the end of the stand-alone global investment-bank model," Mr. McEwan said.

In Stamford, the full impact of the announcement isn't yet clear.

RBS Chief Financial Officer Ewen Stevenson said total job cuts were hard to predict, but that more than half of the roughly 2,000 investment-banking jobs in Stamford will go. The bank's distinctive curved-glass building there, with a 95,000-square-foot trading floor, "is probably bigger than we need, so we'll be looking at that in due course," Mr. Stevenson said.

Bob McKillip, the firm's head of corporate and institutional banking in the Americas, broke the news to an impromptu gathering of a few hundred employees in Stamford at about 10 a.m. on Thursday but didn't offer many specifics.

Several employees said Mr. McKillip repeatedly stressed the bank's goal to "simplify" the firm.

The employees added that few people in the firm were blindsided by the announcement.

In effect, the bank plans for its U.S. operations to be a satellite that will help it meet "the needs of our core customers in the U.K. and Western Europe," a spokesman said.

As part of reducing its investment-banking footprint, RBS plans to sell or wind down its cash-management and trade-finance businesses outside of the U.K. and Ireland. That will include cutting its transaction-services business in Stamford.

Among the businesses it will keep in Stamford: rates and currencies trading and sales, as well as a scaled-down version of its debt-underwriting businesses.

Its broker-dealer, RBS Securities Inc., remains one of 22 financial institutions labeled a "primary dealer," firms that trade billions of dollars of government bonds every day and must meet various financial tests.

But its corporate-lending business will be "materially reduced," the spokesman said, after RBS signed a deal to sell a book of U.S. loans and lending commitments to Japan's Mizuho Financial Group Inc. for around $3 billion. More than 90% of those corporate loans are rated investment grade, and the borrowers include corporate heavyweights AT&T Inc., Google Inc. and General Electric Co., a person familiar with the transaction said.

The news of the layoffs was the latest setback for Stamford, which had once appeared on the fast track to becoming a major U.S. center for trading and finance.

In 2005, RBS accepted $100 million of tax breaks in exchange for spending $345 million on a gleaming new headquarters there. It also agreed to retain 700 employees in the state and create 1,150 new jobs.

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