ABN Amro to cut a further 1,500 jobs

Banking group ABN Amro said on Wednesday it is to cut its workforce by a further 1,500 jobs. The round of cuts comes on top of the 975-1,375 redundancies announced in September.

The bank, which is in the process of being privatised, said the new job losses will generate €400m in structural savings.

The job losses were announced alongside the bank’s Q3 earnings, which showed a 19% rise in underlying net profit to €607m. The Q3 earnings mean ABN Amro booked net profit of €1.7bn in the first nine months of the year, a 5% rise on the same period in 2015.

‘As a result of all programmes in place, the total workforce is expected to decline by 13% from 26,500 (22,000 internal and 4,500 external FTEs) in 2015 to approximately 23,000 by 2020,’ CEO Gerrit Zalm said in the quarterly report.

‘Even though we aim to limit the number of redundancies as much as possible and new positions will be created, the ABN Amro workforce is expected to go down by about 10%. The number of external staff is expected to go down by 25-30%.’

Last week it emerged that ABN Amro is writing to some 15,000 clients who live outside Europe to tell them to close down their accounts.

A spokesman said ABN Amro wants to concentrate on being a Dutch and a European bank and that the complex rules surrounding overseas accounts mean there is a risk the bank could be faced with increased costs.