Ulster Bank is to cut 175 senior management roles.

It is part of a voluntary redundancy scheme at the bank and affects those in management roles or above.

But the bank says it will have no impact on services, and is a programme to manage costs.

The voluntary redundancy scheme opened on Wednesday and will close on January 8th.

In a statement, the bank says: "This programme is specifically designed to allow us to continue to focus on improving services for our customers - we do not have any plans to reduce our branch footprint.

"The management population does not include branch managers.

"This reflects our programme to manage costs and improve our cost income ratio in a low interest rate environment building on our ongoing programme of smaller restructures around the business."

Ulster Bank chief executive, Jane Howard, says: “Our strategy is to serve our customers digital-first, supported by our colleagues on the frontline.

"As we simplify our processes and improve our service, the management structure we’ve built is unnecessarily complex, therefore today we opened a voluntary redundancy scheme for our manager colleagues.

"This will reduce our population of managers by c175, removing layers and bring us all closer to our customers to improve our service.”