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Rabobank to cut 9,000 more jobs

Xinhua, December 10, 2015 Adjust font size:

As part of a new strategy Rabobank will cut an extra 9,000 jobs from 2016 to 2018, the Dutch bank announced on Wednesday.

The bank currently employs around 47,000 employees (in FTEs), of which 35,000 in the Netherlands and around 12,000 working outside the Netherlands. The Rabobank Group has international branches in some 40 countries.

The back office and support functions are most affected, but the bank wants to work more efficiently in all businesses. The workforce reduction will be achieved partly through natural wastage and partly by a decrease in the use of external contractors.

"The key focus will be to help staff from work to work. Rabobank will make every possible effort to avoid compulsory redundancies," Rabobank stated in a statement.

The reorganization follows on top of reorganizations that have been deployed since 2013, at the cost of 10,000 jobs, of which 7,000 are already gone. The remaining 3,000 are already planned in ongoing programs in the forthcoming period.

The bank announced that as a customer-focused cooperative bank it wants to be closer than ever to customers, members and society.

"Rabobank will invest in new forms of contact points in the coming years in addition to the current bank branches," the bank stated. "For instance mobile advice centers, pop-up stores and bank advice at home. Next year a few hundred new contact points will be introduced."

"We want to be literally and metaphorically even closer to and nearby our customers," CEO Wiebe Draijer said in a press release.

The bank also has to strengthen the balance sheet and improve financial results. The company aims to achieve, partly by cost savings and partly by increasing income, a gross result improvement of 2.1 billion euros (2.31 billion U.S. dollars) in 2020. Gross income was 12.857 billion euros by the end of 2014, compared to 13.030 billion euros one year earlier.

Besides a new strategy Rabobank also announced a change of structure. From Jan. 1, 2016 the 106 local Rabobanks and Rabobank Netherlands will merge to form one cooperative Rabobank, which will then operate with one banking license and one set of financial statements.

"The new governance gives local Rabobanks greater scope to focus on customers in their own local market," Draijer said. (1 euro = 1.10 U.S. dollars) Endit