Britian's biggest high street bank is to axe hundreds more jobs in the latest phase of a restructuring that will see 10% of its workforce culled by the end of next year.
Sky News understands that Lloyds Banking Group plans to inform staff later today that approximately 300 roles are to go - out of a total of 9,000 earmarked by senior executives under a three-year plan.
The location of the affected staff was unclear, although the announcement will come amid a brutal environment for big banks, with bosses complaining of tough market conditions and subdued levels of client activity.
Major lenders including Barclays and HSBC are also engaged in substantial job-cutting programmes, while the taxpayer-backed Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) said last week it would close dozens of NatWest branches and axe 600 jobs.
Lloyds, which is 9%-owned by taxpayers, is expected to be well insulated from the sharp declines in revenues reported by Wall Street banks in the last week because of its focus on retail and business lending.
Antonio Horta-Osorio, Lloyds' chief executive, said 18 months ago that the rise in digital consumption of banking services was a key driver of changing headcount needs.
Roughly 5,600 of the 9,000 affected jobs have already been cut.
A Lloyds spokesman said it "would not comment on future announcements – colleagues would always be informed first".
George Osborne, the Chancellor, wants to offer billions of pounds of discounted Lloyds shares to ordinary investors later this year, although the timing of a sale - already delayed once because of market conditions - has yet to be finalised.
The latest wave of job cuts will increase to well beyond 50,000 the total number of jobs shed by Lloyds since it rescued HBOS, the stricken mortgage lender, during the 2008 financial crisis.
An official inquiry into HBOS's failure last year laid the blame at the door of the bank's management and board, with regulators continuing to pursue regulatory sanctions against those deemed culpable.
The Government initially held a 43% stake in Lloyds but has reduced that to just under 9%, generating more than £16bn in proceeds, against the original £20.5bn capital injection.
That return has come despite the bank having to set aside more than £16bn for the mis-selling of payment protection insurance - by far the largest sum of any UK lender.
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