ABN Amro will cut up to 1,000 jobs by 2018 as customers increasingly manage their finances online, part of an overhaul that has helped boost profits and paves the way for the Dutch bank to return to private ownership.

Chief executive Gerrit Zalm had said it will take three solid quarters for him to recommend privatisation to the government. That milestone, analysts say, has now been reached.

In the third quarter, the bank's underlying net profit rose 56 per cent year-on-year to €450 million ($559 million), helped by a rising housing market and improvements in bad loans.

'They passed the asset quality review extremely well. That was the last uncertainty,' said Benoit Petrarque, analyst at Kepler Cheuvreux, adding a sale could come in the second quarter of next year. 'It's a very attractive bank right now.'

A flagship of the Dutch financial services industry until the financial crisis, a much diminished ABN Amro was bought by the state in 2008 for €21.7 billion ($27 billion).

The government and parliament will ultimately rule on the timetable for its re-listing. A government spokeswoman said yesterday that it aimed to return the bank to market as soon as conditions were right.

ABN Amro said its decision to cut jobs in its retail arm as clients move to managing finances online would mean a provision of 50-75m euros in the next quarter.

The bank's mobile banking app gets 1.5 million users a day, while of the bank's five million retail customers, only two million ever visit the bank's 300 existing branches.

'They only visit once every two years on average,' chief financial officer Kees Van Dijkhuizen said.

ABN Amro issued 30 to 40 per cent more mortgages than last year, Van Dijkhuizen said, as the mortgage market as a whole grew 35 per cent and house prices, off 20 per cent since their pre-recession peak, rose 3.5 per cent.-Reuters