ABN Amro North America plans to close 19 Chicago offices as a result of some recent acquisitions.
Three offices will be closed at the end of August, and the rest are scheduled to close in late November. The company said no layoffs are planned, because all workers would be offered jobs in other branches.
ABN Amro North America acquired Comerica Inc.'s Illinois bank, with $1.4 billion of assets and 25 branches, last October. It bought Troy, Mich.- based Standard Federal Bancorp., which had 14 Chicago branches, in May.
ABN Amro North America, which has $97 billion of assets, will operate 130 offices in Chicago under the LaSalle Bank name following the closures.
The Comerica and Standard Federal deals left ABN Amro with a number of branches near each other, officials said. All the branches being closed are within two miles of each other. ABN Amro has made seven bank acquisitions since 1990, three in the past eight months.
Four or five of the Chicago closings will be a result of the acquisition of $15.8 billion-asset Standard Federal.
Standard Federal, a savings and loan that spans Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio, will retain its name outside Chicago. None of its branches outside the city are scheduled to close.
ABN Amro North America, a subsidiary of the Dutch banking giant, operates under five banks and two savings and loans in Chicago. It plans to merge two of the bank charters as well as Standard Federal's Chicago branches into the savings and loan later this year.
Commenting on why it took so long to decide which branches would close, Scott K. Heitmann, head of Midwest consumer banking for ABN Amro, said, "We do not make customer-related decisions lightly." u
