What you need to know about the employment situation at RBS and Ulster Bank

Yes, today was RBS results day. In some ways, the newly pruned bank did fairly well. In others it didn't.

There was an operating profit of £1.8bn in the first half of 2012. Excluding £125m set aside for costs related to the 'technology incident' which resulted in customers being locked out of their accounts and the £50m set aside for interest rate swap mis-selling, this was in line with operating profits in the first half of 2011. In a difficult market, this was fairly impressive.

Equally, RBS's investment bank (Global Markets) business did well compared to its competitors. Bruce Van Saun, RBS's CFO said it's exceeded its targets so far this year, implying all the investment banking redundancies since the start of the year have paid off.

On the other hand, however, once an accounting charge related to the value of its own debt was factored in, along with the cost of the asset protection scheme, RBS made a big loss - of £1.5bn.

Yet, with the underlying business profitable, the good news is that RBS didn't announce any additional job cuts this morning.

As the chart below, taken from today's report shows, RBS has cut 2,300 jobs since March.