[Photo: Ell Brown / Flickr]

Royal Bank of Scotland Group will probably deepen cuts at its investment bank and its Irish business to boost capital after flunking Bank of England stress tests.

The Edinburgh-based lender may need to dispose of £44 Billion ($56 Billion) of risk-weighted assets to improve its capital buffers, analysts at Barclays wrote in a note to clients on Thursday. RBS will probably cut costs at its Ulster Bank retail division in Ireland and the corporate and institutional bank, which houses bond underwriting and securities trading business, according to UBS Group.

After CEO Ross McEwan hired former Danske Bank A/S executive Gerry Mallon to lead Ulster Bank in June with a mandate to cut excess costs and improve returns, “the market will be looking for evidence of delivery in 2017.”

McEwan, 59, is coming under increasing pressure to return RBS to profitability and financial resilience 8 years after the bank required a £45.5Bn taxpayer bailout. On Wednesday, the U.K. lender agreed with regulators to revise its plans to bolster capital after failing the BOE’s annual health check. McEwan is on track to report RBS’s ninth straight annual loss in February, while looming charges for past misconduct and failure to sell its Williams & Glyn unit are undermining his turnaround efforts.

RBS has slashed risk-weighted assets at its investment bank by two-thirds to £36.6Bn since the end of 2014 and the bank is also cutting costs from legacy computer systems built for a global securities division that no longer exists.

About 200 million pounds of annual expenses at the securities unit through 2020 come from investment to replace its IT system and enable the lender to cut administrative jobs, according to UBS.