Financial services giant American Express is axing 250 jobs in Brighton.

The city's biggest private-sector employer said the move was part of an overhaul of its customer services operations and would affect workers at Amex House in Edward Street.

The workers most likely to lose their jobs were analysts, vendor managers, and people in "technical", non-customer facing positions.

Doug Smith, head of public affairs, said: "We have been talking to staff this week about restructuring the customer services operations and seeing how we can improve efficiency.

"We are working closely with those employees affected by the proposal to ensure they receive the necessary support and counsel they will require to help them through this period of uncertainty and change."

Staff going to work today were largely in the dark about the details of the redundancies.

One worker at the Lanchester House office, in Trafalgar Place, Brighton, said: "I didn't know anything about this but it doesn't surprise me.

"They do this all the time, especially in big companies. They hire too many people and then later they just get rid of them all. It's just ridiculous."

An employee at Amex House said: "We just got a group email sent to us and it said 250 people were going to be affected. It said the people who were affected had been told, so I presume I will be OK."

Another said: "No doubt with the initial shock of it there will be a few sour faces but if they are going to be redeployed then maybe they'll be OK."

Today's announcement is being seen by the business community as another worrying blow for the financial services sector in Sussex, which has been hit by hundreds of redundancies in recent years.

Mark Froud, chief executive of Sussex Enterprise, said: "The loss of jobs at American Express will inevitably have immense consequences for those directly involved as well as an impact on the local economy."

In October last year insurance firm Royal & SunAlliance said it was axing 1,100 jobs by moving call centre work to India. The company could not say how many jobs would go at its Horsham offices, which employ just under 1,000 people.

Amex had already announced it was transferring 188 jobs abroad as part of a costcutting drive.

Some 123 jobs have been moved out of Sussex House, in Burgess Hill, to India and the remaining 65 transferred to a finance centre in the US.