Sunday, August 28, 2011

Bank job cuts top 60,000 after ABN Amro axes thousands

ABN Amro has become the latest bank to announce thousands of staff cuts as the total number of jobs lost in the banking sector in recent months rose above 60,000. 

The Dutch bank said it will cut 2,350 staff, or just under 10pc of its workforce, over the next three to four years as part of a wholesale restructuring of its business designed to saved hundreds of millions of euros in costs.
Taking the cuts announced by ABN into account, the total number of banking sector job losses announced in recent months now exceeds 60,000 or roughly 5pc of the industry headcount.
ABN said 1,500 jobs would be cut through redundancies and a further 850 through natural attrition, costing the bank €200m (£176m) in restructuring costs, according to its financial results for the first half of the year published today.
Earlier this week, UBS confirmed speculation that it was to cut several thousand jobs, announcing the layoff of 3,500 staff, or which about 300 are expected to come from the bank’s London office.
All of Britain’s major banks, with the exception of Standard Chartered, have already cut or are cutting thousands of staff. Barclays has already cut 1,400 staff this year and plans to cut as many as 3,000 more jobs within the next 18 months.

HSBC has announced the cull of about 30,000 staff by the end of 2013, or about one in 10 jobs, as part of its own cost drive, and state-backed lender Royal Bank of Scotland is expected to reduce the workforce in its investment banking division by 2,000 within the next year.
The largest cuts have come as Lloyds Banking Group, which announced 15,000 “role reductions” as part of its strategy review, which will take the total number of jobs lost at the lender since its taxpayer bailout to about 40,000 – roughly equal to the size of the entire workforce of engineering company Rolls Royce.
“When managements resort to headcount reductions, these are a powerful signal that firms think the revenue outlook has weakened beyond just normal volatility,” said analysts at Barclays Capital in a note to clients published this month.
Nearly all of Europe's major banks have announced year-on-year falls in revenues for the first half of the year as markets have deteriorated.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8724643/Bank-job-cuts-top-60000-after-ABN-Amro-axes-thousands.html

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