UK supermarket giant Tesco is set to create more than 800 jobs at its fast-growing personal finance unit by opening a customer service centre in Glasgow.
The centre, at Broadway One in central Glasgow, will open in the first half of 2010, managing customer sales and service for Tesco Personal Finance. The site is being built with the help of a £5 million grant from the Scottish government.
Tesco is making an aggressive push into financial services as it seeks to take advantage of public disillusionment with high street banks.
In December it bought out the Royal Bank of Scotland to take complete control of Tesco Personal Finance and has been mooted as a possible bidder for the government-owned Northern Rock.
The unit already claims nearly six million customers for its products - which include credit cards, loans and savings accounts - and plans to open 30 bank branches in stores by the end of the year.
In March the supermarket outlined plans to create 200 banking jobs at a new Edinburgh headquarters for the financial services business.
Commenting on the new centre, Andrew Higginson, CEO, Tesco Retailing Services, says: "The opening of the new customer service centre will be a significant step towards TPF offering a full banking service. It is hard to ignore that people's trust in the banking sector is at a very low ebb. Offering first class customer service, however, is central to our Tesco values and the new centre will most certainly help us put the Tesco into Tesco Personal Finance."