Metro Bank is cutting 1,000 jobs and putting an end to its trademark seven-day branch model, after nearly tripling the size of its cost cutting plan in the wake of its autumn rescue deal.
The lender said on Wednesday that it had expanded an original £30m cost savings plan first announced in October to £50m – after axing about 200 more staff than it had initially aimed for – and now planned to slash a further £30m in costs by the end of the year, bringing its total savings to £80m.
Its chief executive, Daniel Frumkin, said the bank was considering further job cuts and would scale back its seven-days-a-week opening model across its 76 branches from April. That will include closing on Sundays, reducing daily hours in some branches and moving some to five-days-a-week openings.
“Based off of the modelling we’ve done, we’ll still be open more hours than any of our competitors on the high street. And we’ve aligned it with actual customer activity,” Frumkin said.
The expanded overhaul comes months after Metro, which was co-founded by the US billionaire Vernon Hill and became the UK’s first new high street lender in 150 years when it launched in 2010, clinched a £925m rescue package in October that involved cornerstone investment from the Columbian billionaire Jaime Gilinski Bacal. The Latin American banking tycoon took a 53% stake in Metro as a result of the deal.
It avoided a potential breakup or takeover of the UK high street lender, which was thrown into turmoil after failing to convince regulators to loosen its capital rules and allow it to hold less money against the lender’s mortgage risks. The decision left Metro with a shortfall on its balance sheet, and market panic that eventually resulted in the emergency deal.
The cost-cutting announcements came as Metro reported a pre-tax profit of £30.5m for the whole of 2023. That is up from a £70.7m loss a year earlier and marks its first statutory pre-tax profit since 2018.
Metro Bank shares rose 0.6% on Wednesday morning.
