Britain's struggling financial services industry will lose another 30,000 jobs over the next six months, according to research by employers’ group the CBI.

The figure amounts to 3% of the one million-strong financial services workforce and marks an escalation in the scale of redundancies across the sector.

Last year, about 40,000 jobs were cut as banks, building societies, insurers and investment managers contended with the sharpest fall in profits and business levels since the CBI began its quarterly financial services survey 20 years ago.

The CBI and PricewaterhouseCoopers, who jointly conducted the survey, said staff numbers are being slashed “at the fastest rates since 1993 to try to trim costs and alleviate sharp falls in profitability”. Confidence has taken another knock, with a balance of 34% of the 90 respondents saying they were less optimistic about the industry than in December.

Daily Telegraph