Lloyds Banking Group is closing an office in Dunfermline affecting 1,500 employees as it accelerates plans to cut costs and digitise operations.

Staff at the base on the Pitreavie Business Park will be asked to either work from home, or relocate to the Citymark building in Edinburgh. The bank is also shutting its large offices in Speke, Liverpool.

The office, formerly Bank of Scotland’s Visa Centre, was built in the mid-1980s and is opposite Nationwide’s former Dunfermline HQ, which closed last year. 

A spokeswoman for Lloyds said: “To achieve the ambitious strategy we launched in February 2022 and deliver a better service to our customers, we are transforming our business.

“To do this and move forward faster, we hired 10,000 experts last year to drive our transformation and we will continue to look at all options to ensure we are well placed to deliver for our customers.

“Making changes means not only creating new roles and upskilling colleagues in some parts of the business but also having to say goodbye to talented people who have been a part of the group’s success in the past.

“Where that is unfortunately the case, we will do everything we can to support them with the changes recently announced.”

Ged Nichols, the general secretary of Accord, said: “Accord has contacted every individual member who is impacted to offer support and advice.

“Our priorities are to ensure compulsory redundancies are minimised and that members who will leave the business receive the full redundancy compensation they’re entitled to under union agreements.”