The wealth management arm of Royal Bank of Scotland – comprising Coutts, RBS Coutts and Adam & Co – is shedding up to 500 jobs, or 10 per cent of its total headcount, in a three-year restructuring plan, the UK-listed banking group announced today.

“Under-investment in IT systems over recent years has resulted in the need to make a major investment in our processes and technology to help us deliver better service to our clients,” the bank said in a statement. "This means we will need less people working across our back office function - up to 500 less roles over the 3 year period," it said.

RBS, along with its UK peer, Lloyds Banking Group, has received billions of pounds in taxpayers’ money to boost its balance sheet after suffering huge losses in the credit crunch. RBS has previously announced plans to spin off non-core business as part of a restructuring deal.

So far, there has been no suggestion that RBS intends to sell its private banking businesses.

The announcement today notably made no mention of front-line private banking jobs. In fact, after it temporarily froze graduate recruitment to the wealth business over a year ago, RBS has since re-started taking on graduate trainees for private banking jobs.

"We are working hard to rebuild RBS in order to repay taxpayers for their support and having to cut jobs is the most difficult part of this process. Today we are announcing a major investment in our processes and technology in our wealth management division to help us deliver better service and a wider choice for our clients," a spokesperson for RBS said.

“As a result of the changes we are restructuring our operations and this will unfortunately lead to job losses. We will do all we can to support our staff through this process and to keep compulsory redundancy to an absolute minimum. So far the job losses we've announced to date have resulted in fewer than one in four people being made compulsorily redundant,” it said.