ABN AMRO to cut 2,350 jobs

Nationalised Dutch lender ABN AMRO Bank NV today announced plans to cut 2,350 jobs, some 9 per cent of its workforce, taking the job cuts by lenders worldwide to above 60,000 since the beginning of this year.

The Amsterdam-based bank said that 2,350 positions would be lost in the next 3-4 years with 1,500 positions through redundancies and the remaining 850 through
natural attrition - a move designed to save hundreds of millions of euros.

Most of the job cuts will come from its back-office operations such as IT, but some retail and private banking positions will also be axed, the bank said, adding that it had made a restructuring provision of €200 million for this purpose in the first half of 2011.

ABN was acquired in 2007 by a consortium led by Royal Bank of Scotland, Belgian-Dutch group Fortis and Spain's Banco Santander, in a massive, overpriced €71 billion deal just months before the onset of the global financial crisis, only to be bailed out by the Dutch and Belgian governments a year later.

The Dutch government plans to sell ABN, preferably in 2014, by either listing it on the stock market, to create the Netherlands' third-largest bank by assets or by selling it.

The layoff comes as ABN posted improved Q2 results but warned that it expects interest margins to shrink and bad loans to increase for the rest of the year.
 
Today the bank reported net profit of $1.25 billion for the first half of the year, compared with a loss of $1.4 billion last year, with expenses now at 63 per cent of income, down from 75 per cent last year.

"The impact of the government debt concerns on the global economy is still unclear. Though our resilient businesses and strong capital base put us in a good position, we remain cautious," said Gerrit Zalm, the chairman of ABN Amro. "Our first-half 2011 results should therefore not be extrapolated to the remainder of the year."

With the cuts announced today by ABN, the total number of job cuts announced by global banks has risen to 64,425 or about 5 per cent of the banking sector headcount.

The largest cuts have been announced by Europe's largest lender HSBC, followed by other banks like Lloyds Banking Group, Bank of America Credit Suisse, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, UBS, Grupo Satander, Anglo Irish Bank and others