Spanish bank Santander is to cut 1,900 jobs in its three businesses in Britain - Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley.
The bank said that the jobs would be cut in 2009 to reduce costs and did not rule out compulsory redundancies.
Santander is one of the eurozone's largest banks by market capitalisation and the second-biggest in the world after HSBC.
It says it does not plan to close major sites, but it might consolidate some smaller offices into larger sites.
The BBC reports Santander plans to save Stg180 million by the end of 2011.
It bought Abbey in 2004, for about Stg8 billion, in Europe's biggest cross-border bank takeover.
The deal gave Santander control of Britain's second-largest mortgage lender, with 741 branches and 18 million customers.
In 2008, it bought Alliance & Leicester in a Stg1.3 billion deal.
In September, Britain's biggest lender to landlords, Bradford & Bingley, was taken over by the government after the credit crisis shut off its funding.
Santander paid Stg612 million to take control of 197 Bradford & Bingley's branches and Stg20 billion in deposits.
