INSURANCE company Britannic Assurance is to axe 2,000 jobs over the next year.
Most of the redundancies will be within Britannic's direct salesforce as the company seeks savings of £82m during the next year.
The Birmingham firm said the competitive insurance marketplace meant it no longer made economic sense to maintain such a large salesforce. It will be left with a specialist sales team of 100 advisors.
About 1,600 UK sales staff will lose their jobs, as well as 400 support staff at Britannic's base in Birmingham.
The cuts come weeks after the Prudential axed the majority of its door-to-door sales team.
Britannic said its traditional customer base of middle-to- lower income families meant it could no longer sustain a large sales force.
It said pressure from competitors, regulators and Government legislation had put the squeeze on margins.
The size of its sales team had an "adverse impact" on the returns received by customers and shareholders, it said.
Britannic said that a further 100 staff would be retained to market the new stakeholder pensions. It had also arranged for its products to be available through 260 branches of estate agency Spicer Haart
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