• HSBC to cut 700 posts • Total Lloyds job cuts now almost 45,000 • Unite says one in eight roles will go • Strategic review hopes to save £1.5bn a year • Halifax to be revamped and open branches on Saturday

António Horta-Osório stamped his mark on Lloyds Banking Group on Thursday, cutting 15,000 jobs and pledging to revitalise the Halifax brand in an effort to help taxpayers make a profit on their £20bn investment in the bailed-out bank.

On a bleak day for employment in the banking industry, HSBC also cut 700 jobs at its UK arm to save £9m – a sum officials at Unite noted was the same as the bonus of chief executive Stuart Gulliver.

While unions were furious about the scale of the job losses at Lloyds – which are now on track to touch 45,000 as a result of the rescue of HBOS during the 2008 crisis – the City applauded the actions of Horta-Osório, who was presenting the outcome of a strategic review he conducted after taking the helm of Lloyds on 1 March.

The Portuguese-born banker, who was lured from Spanish bank Santander, was at first unrepentant about the scale of the job cuts although later admitted: "I do regret that we have to do this. I would prefer to put this bank back on its feet without reducing staff."

But, he insisted the cuts were essential. "We have to do this. This bank has lost money, it's losing money this year on an after-tax basis.

"We have to get this bank back on to its feet to support the UK economy and we have to pay taxpayers' money back," he said.

The deep cuts to the workforce, to take place by 2014, added more than £1bn to the share price but still left the taxpayer nursing a £6.4bn loss on its 41% stake despite the 10% rise to 49p.

"Astonishingly one in eight roles will be lost over the next three years," said David Fleming, national officer of the Unite union. Lloyds hires 10,000 staff a year and Horta-Osório stressed that he hoped that "natural attrition and internal deployment" would help achieve the cuts, which are expected to target middle managers and back-office staff.

The job cuts should help Lloyds achieve £1.5bn of annual savings in 2014, on top of £2bn of savings achieved through integration.

Horta-Osório acknowledged that his bonuses will be linked to the new strategic review. "Our focus now is on delivering early results. As you would expect, our leadership team's incentives will be aligned behind group financial targets – but they will also be aligned behind customer satisfaction, SME [small and medium enterprises] lending and colleague engagement targets," he said.

The bank will have to spend £2.3bn to achieve the cost cuts, which also include pulling out of half of the 30 countries where Lloyds currently has operations by 2014.

It set new financial targets such as return on equity of between 12.5% and 14.5% by 2014, and the aspiration to start paying a dividend again once the EU ban on such payouts is lifted next year. Analysts at UBS, the bank's broker, reckoned this might happen in a year's time. It also wants its loan-to-deposit ratio – which indicates how much cash it needs to raise on the market – to reach 130% from 146%.

Horta-Osório also set out a course for Halifax to compete with the Lloyds brand on the high street. Some £500m of the savings – pinpointed after 111 cost-cutting initiatives were identified – will be ploughed into the Halifax brand and other initiatives.

The Halifax brand is to be revamped and relaunched in September with a return to its "irreverent" attitude of the past and all its branches will open on Saturdays.

He has detected that Halifax staff are more "entrepreneurial" than those at Lloyds. Halifax attracts customers from Lloyds although there is little movement the other way. As well as kick starting Halifax, a key part of his strategy is to sell Scottish Widows insurance products through the bank's branch network – a cross-selling strategy that previous management of the bank have attempted to achieve.

Paul Mumford, senior fund manager at Cavendish Asset Management, said: "With this comprehensive review, Horta-Osório has firmly stamped his mark on Lloyds. Whilst painful in some respects these steps represent necessary medicine; the bank has been through a troubled period and needs a spring clean in order to best serve shareholders – including taxpayers – in the long run."

Horta-Osório, who cites one of his hobbies as swimming with sharks, earned a reputation as a cost cutter at Santander in the UK where he combined Abbey National with Alliance & Leicester and parts of Bradford & Bingley during the banking crisis.

The bank also admitted that it was yet to call on the services of former chief executive Eric Daniels who can claim nine months of his £1m salary until September after leaving the board at the end of February, when he declared the bank had returned to financial health.

Horta-Osório quickly knocked a hole in first quarter profits, declaring a £3.2bn provision for payment protection insurance mis-selling.