The email, which has emerged a week after Lloyds’s bill for mis-selling payment protection insurance topped £10bn, reveals the aggressive sales culture which still pervades the bank, the Daily Mail reports.

It was sent by an unnamed regional manager to a branch and shows how employees are set strict targets to make as many appointments with customers as possible.

It uses industry jargon such as ‘helping’ customers with credit cards, and ‘needs met’ to describe sales.

Staff are also set targets for ‘referrals’, which means passing a customer to another department of the bank which will try to sell them a different product or investment. This is known in the industry as ‘cross-selling’.

In the email, the manager piles the pressure on branch staff and chastises them for falling short.

It says: ‘I will require the number of lending appointments booked again by email before you go home from every branch. Detail needed – how many lending [sic] booked for the next 5 days, how many advisers in the business.’ Referring to the number of daily appointments advisers are expected to make in a week, it warns: ‘I’ll give you a clue that 1’s, 2’s and 3’s are simply not acceptable.’

Another extract states: ‘9 customers helped with a credit card (which embarrassingly is our busiest day of the week!!!). With volumes and productivity being measured, I don’t understand how 43 advisers can only help 20 customers with an internet (a free product?) and 0 with a credit card (another free product?)’

The manager warns that staff who fail to hit targets will see bonuses cut. ‘Come on team you are better leaders than these numbers are telling me. You have ten working days left this quarter to make a difference to your half year.’

Mark Brown, of Lloyds Trade Union, which represents staff at the bank and has alerted the City watchdog to the email, describes this as a clear ‘threat’. He added: ‘It’s not even implied. It’s gratuitous, offensive and menacing.’

The union has accused the bank of setting ‘unachievable targets’, adding that these ‘drive the wrong kind of behaviours, to the detriment of customers, potentially’.

The email was written in June – six months after Lloyds was fined a record £28m for promoting a sales culture in which some workers were told their pay would be halved if they missed targets.

Staff were handed ‘champagne bonuses’ for selling customers investments they did not want or need. One salesman sold insurance to himself, his wife and a colleague to prevent his salary from being cut. At the time MPs called for chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio to be stripped of his £2.5m bonus.

Last night Lloyds insisted the email ‘is in no way representative of behaviour across the group’, adding it had launched an internal investigation and was taking disciplinary action.