Your IndustryMar 14 2016

RBS culls 221 advice roles

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RBS culls 221 advice roles

Royal Bank of Scotland has become the latest company to put its faith in robo-advice with a new online platform understood to be launching in the summer.

RBS and NatWest will no longer be offering face-to-face investment advice for customers with assets of less than £250,000.

It will also be scrapping face-to-face protection advice completely, offering it only over the telephone.

This means 550 jobs will be lost, including 221 advice roles.

A NatWest and RBS spokesman said: “We want to help as many customers as possible invest their money in the right way for them.

“The demand for face-to-face investment advice is changing. Our customers increasingly want to bank with us using digital technology.

“As a result, we are scaling back our face-to-face advisers and significantly investing in an online investing platform that enables us to help a new group of customers with as little as £500 to invest.”

It is understood the new online platform will be launched in June.

In January RBS confirmed to FTAdviser that it was developing its mass-market advice proposition to “better serve its customers”.

Yorkshire Building Society announced in September that it would be offering customers the chance to take “expert financial advice” in their homes, via video conferencing, while LV= has also moved into robo-advice.

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Matthew Harris, director of Fife-based Dalbeath Financial Planning, said: “People in general like to do things online if they can but when it comes to quite significant sums of money advice can be reassuring.

“But £250,000 does seem a pretty high level to set a cut-off point at.”