Standard Life Aberdeen employees have been informed that the company plans to axe roughly 320 staff from its IT department.

The staff were summoned to a meeting where the firm outlaid its plans and explained that its IT services will be outsourced to the US-headquartered IT business Cognizent, which has a large number of employees based in India.

Out of the 370 staff, who are a mix of contractors and permanent employees, the company said it will retain around 25 people in their current roles while a further 25 were given the option to be moved over to work for Cognizent. The company refused to confirm the number of job losses.

The staff being let go will lose their jobs just days before Christmas, according to the Evening Times. The bulk of the IT department is based in Edinburgh, while a small number affected work in Aberdeen and London.

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Standard Life Aberdeen was born out of a merger between Aberdeen Investment and Standard Life two years ago. The company said that the cuts were part of a planned three-year transformation as part of the 2017 merger. It announced that the tie-up would result in 800 job losses – around 10% of the workforce.

“During the day, everyone was called into a meeting, we were told to drop everything and go,” said one worker, who wished to remain anonymous. “I thought it was just the contractors who were affected, but it was the permanent staff too. I finish on 12 December.

“No-one saw it coming. When we heard about the meeting, we thought it would be about management teams, something like that. Everyone is just deflated, no-one thought this would happen. They think it is cheaper in the short term, but they’re not thinking long term.”

A spokesman for Standard Life Aberdeen said: “This was part of the three-year merger process set out in 2017. Hopefully, a significant number of full-time employees will be able to transfer to Cognizant and this will improve our technology infrastructure and most importantly, improve the service to our customers.”