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Following a review by its new CEO, the bank will wind down all of its non-European corporate banking operations and stop providing trade and commodity finance.
«We will serve clients in segments where we can achieve scale, so we will focus on the Netherlands and Northwest Europe, where we will invest and grow,» CEO Robert Swaak, who was appointed in January, said in comments with the bank’s second-quarter results, published Thursday.
Going forward, the bank’s Corporate & Institutional Banking (CIB) will focus on clients in Northwest Europe and Clearing and will exit all non-European corporate banking activities. Trade & Commodity Finance activities will be discontinued completely, and Natural Resources and Transportation & Logistics will be limited to Europe, while it will impose stricter lending criteria and credit limits, the bank said on Tuesday.
Non-core activities, which comprise around 45 percent of CIB’s client loans, representing approximately 35 percent of CIB’s RWA and over 10 percent of total RWA, are expected to be wound down in the next three to four years and will affect around 800 full-time employees, of which 150 are in the Netherlands.
A Netherlands-based spokesperson for ABN Amro said that the schedule of winding down for non-core activities has not been set and that it will differ based on business line and region. In Singapore, only its Clearing desk will remain.
We can not yet say exactly how many jobs in Singapore are impacted. This will also be worked out in the coming period, the spokesperson said.
The bank had one of the largest exposures of any bank to the collapse of Singapore oil trading company Hin Leong, at around $300 million. It also had a smaller exposure to Zenrock Commodities Trading, another scandal-hit Singapore oil trading firm.
