Metro Bank is scrapping seven-day branch opening times and cutting back hours after shedding 1,000 jobs.

The high street lender, which was rescued in an emergency fundraising last October, will no longer open on Sundays as part of a ￡80m cost-cutting drive.

Some stores will also shut on Saturdays, while early morning and late opening times will also be ditched.

The overhaul has led to the loss of around 1,000 jobs, which is 200 more roles than expected when redundancies were first flagged last year.

Chief executive Daniel Frumkin said the new opening times reflected fewer people going to the bank on the weekend and the difficulty of staff having to work Sundays.

He said: “If you walk into almost any of our city centre stores, there’s very little activity on the weekend overall.

“If we reduce the number of hours in a store, we get to reduce the staffing rota and that ultimately leads to some headcount reduction.

“Sundays were very hard to staff. There weren’t any other banks open on Sunday, so it was difficult.”

Mr Frumkin is planning to strip out a further ￡30m in costs this year and did not rule out further job losses. However, he stressed that no branches will close.

The group currently has 76 stores and is planning to add a further 11 around the country, especially in the North.

Metro Bank was rescued last year in a multimillion-pound deal led by Colombian billionaire Jaime Gilinski Bacal.

The group received ￡325m of fresh funding while ￡600m of debt was also refinanced. Mr Bacal’s fund now owns 52pc of Metro.

The crisis rocked confidence in the lender, although it said on Wednesday that a surge in deposits took total deposits to ￡16.5bn.

Metro launched a campaign to get more people to put their money with the bank, paying savers and depositors higher interest rates.

Mr Frumkin is focusing his new branch push on retail parks and pioneering drive-thru banks for customers, a model commonly seen in his native US.

He said finding new sites for branches was more difficult as fast food chains were competing hard for space.

“We tend to compete much more against McDonald’s, Starbucks and Tim Hortons than we do against a proper retailer for the sites we’re looking for up North,” he said.