The banking group made a number of announcements ahead of revealing full-year and Q4 results in February.

Royal Bank of Scotland, the listed bank which is majority-owned by the UK government, will incur a goodwill charge of £498 million for its private banking arm – the business including Coutts – and reduce its attributable profits for that period by this amount, it said today.

RBS issues full-year results on 26 February.

The banking group, which is battling to improve profitability so that it can return to full private ownership (it was bailed out by the former UK Labour government in 2008), is also changing its business segments for reporting purposes. Private banking will now fall into the commercial and private banking segment; for the purposes of the category, RBS says “private banking services high net worth individuals in the UK”. Last year, RBS sold its non-UK private banking arm, using the Coutts International label, to Switzerland’s Union Bancaire Privée.

As well as making changes to its own corporate pension scheme arrangements, RBS added a provision of $2.2 billion (£1.5 billion) concerning US residential mortgage-backed securities litigation claims for the fourth quarter of last year. It said these provisions may cut attributable group profits by £1.5 billion, and the group's CET 1 capital ratio by 0.6 per cent.

The bank is also making an additional provision of £500 million relating to payment protection insurance, following a recent consultation paper by the UK financial regulator, which will also cut attributable profits at group level by that amount.
 
The banking group said that as at 31 December 2015, it expects to report a CET1 capital ratio of around 15 per cent, down from 16.2 per cent at the end of September last year.

"I am determined to put the issues of the past behind us and make sure RBS is a stronger, safer bank. We will now continue to move further and faster in 2016 to clean-up the bank and improve our core businesses. We've always been open about the scale of past issues facing RBS and although there is clearly much more to do, this announcement is a further step towards addressing legacy issues and building a great bank for our customers and delivering long term value for our shareholders,” Ross McEwan, RBS chief executive, said in a statement.