BANKING giant Santander is to create 200 call centre jobs at its main Merseyside base.

The positions will be created at the group’s Bootle headquarters where around 1,900 people are already employed.

Santander took over the site following its acquisition of Alliance & Leicester in 2008.

It had been previously been the headquarters of the Government-owned Girobank and the building is often still referred to locally as "the Giro".

In all Santander is creating 400 new call centre jobs in a bid to improve its customer service with Glasgow and Leicester accounting for the remaining 200.

The bank said the jobs, in addition to 600 branch-based roles announced in July, would support business generated by its aggressive push into the UK market.

Santander, which earlier this month emerged as the bank with the highest proportion of customer complaints in the UK in the first half of the year, said the new roles would ensure the bank "continues to improve its service".

The group has 25m customers and 1,300 branches following its acquisitions of Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and parts of Bradford & Bingley.

It received 216,158 complaints in the six months to June.

Santander, which employs 22,500 staff in the UK, has seen new products such as the Santander Zero current account drive its market share in the UK, with lending to small and medium businesses also growing by 20% this year.

Earlier this year, the company said it was on track to open a million new accounts for the second year in a row, and posted a 10% rise in pre-tax profits to £875m for the first six months of the year.