Forty-two jobs were lost in the city last Thursday, with the closure of specialist loan-servicing group Certus’s local office.
The company, an offshoot of Bank of Scotland (Ireland), announced last April that it was seeking 225 redundancies from its 1,000-strong workforce in a bid to reshape the business. Central to these plans was the closure of three of its six regional offices between June and September, in Galway, Sligo and Waterford.
Local staff were informed that this would happen on a phased basis, with the Canada Street office in Waterford expected to close on either 30th June, 31st July or 31st August.
On arriving at work last Thursday, however, staff were notified that the planned redundancies would be taking effect immediately. Certus’ signage was removed from the façade of the office on Friday.
Certus was set up in January 2011 and was staffed by many Bank of Scotland (Ireland) employees, who had been with the company for several years. It took on the role of managing the Irish loan book for Lloyds and the decision to resize Certus is understood to be the result of Lloyds Banking Group selling off more and more of its legacy loans in Ireland.
