Dutch bank ABN Amro has reached a deal to sell its commercial insurance business for corporate clients to US-based Aon for an undisclosed amount, the bank announced on April 12. The sale of the insurance operation was prompted "by a strategic reorientation at ABN Amro," the company said.
This tied in with "the general trend in the financial sector towards a greater separation of insurances and banking activities," it said in a statement.
ABN will also transfer its insurance arms for small and medium-sized businesses to ABN Amro Verzekering, a joint venture between majority shareholder Delta Lloyd Group (51 percent) and ABN, the statement added. From a total of 270 jobs, 74 would be transferred to Aon, while another 116 jobs will be taken up by ABM Amro Verzekering. The remaining jobs would stay within the ABN Amro fold but the bank "cannot guarentee that no jobs will be lost." ABN's spokesman Jeroen van Maarschalkerweerd declined to give a sale price, adding that the deal was not related to restructuring of the bank arising from its near collapse in the global financial crisis in 2008.
The Amsterdam-based banker was taken over by Royal Bank of Scotland in 2007 in a massive, overpriced deal just before the global financial crisis sparked by collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers.
ABN Amro, which had interests across Europe, was subsequently bailed out by the Dutch and Belgian governments and was then broken up into its smaller parts, leaving the business in the Netherlands as the rump holding.