Royal Bank of Scotland's (RBS) decision to cut 9000 jobs worldwide, 4500 of which were outside the UK, is unlikely to have a large impact on the Australian operations.
The measures announced yesterday related to the bank's group manufacturing roles, consisting predominantly of back office positions.
In contrast, the Australian business's main activities are in corporate lending and investment banking after the bank absorbed ABN Amro Australia in 2007.
It would be reasonable to assume Australia would be saved from a spate of redundancies, people familiar with the matter told InvestorDaily.
The measures are more likely to affect RBS's Asian operations, where 10,000 group manufacturing employees work in offices in Hong Kong, India and Singapore.
RBS said it would work to minimise the number of job losses through natural turnover and redeployment programs.
"RBS agrees ... that compulsory redundancies should be a last resort," the bank said.
The job cuts are part of a restructuring program that seeks to reduce annual costs by more than $5 billion within the next three years.
They come on top of the 2700 redundancies announced by the bank earlier this year.
RBS has suffered throughout the financial crisis, reporting a loss of $50 billion for 2008.
