LONDON (Bloomberg) - Tesco plc., the largest UK food retailer, said it is expanding its personal finance unit with the opening of a call center in Scotland, bringing the company closer to providing full banking services.

The call center in Glasgow, which will manage sales and services for Tesco Personal Finance, will create more than 800 jobs, Cheshunt, UK-based Tesco said in a statement yesterday.

Tesco assumed full control of the consumer finance joint venture after buying partner Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc. out for £950 million ($1.5 billion) last year. The opening of the center will be a "significant step toward TPF offering a full banking service", the retailer said yesterday.

The recruitment process will start later this year and the first workers are expected to be in place in the first half of 2010, Victoria Lomax, a spokeswoman for the retailer's banking division, said in a phone interview.

"We are in part of the process to build up a bank and establish our sales so we want to set up our own customer service center," she said.

The unit's Edinburgh headquarters has added 150 jobs on top of its 250 employees at the beginning of this year, according to Ms Lomax.

Confidence in British banks has been hurt after record losses linked to sub-prime loans led the government to bail out the industry. Tesco would be able to use the strength of its brand to attract banking customers, Datamonitor said in February.

"It is hard to ignore that people's trust in the banking sector is at a very low ebb," Benny Higgins, chief executive of Tesco Retailing Services said in the statement. "Offering first class customer service, however, is central to our Tesco values and the new centre will most certainly help us put the Tesco into Tesco Personal Finance."

The personal finance unit, which has almost six million customers, offers a range of services including insurance, credit cards and personal loans.

Tesco rose 1.3 percent to 368 pence as of 9.22 a.m. in London, giving it a market value of £29.2 billion.