Britain is expected to shoulder the worst of the redundancy pain as the two banks plan to cut 23,600 jobs in the West.

As well as plans to reduce headcount in the developed world by 12,800, Barclays and ABN also want to shift 10,800 positions to countries where wages are lower.

Jobs in Barclays’ head office, ABN’s London investment banking arm and the IT operations and call centres of both banks look vulnerable.

Barclays and ABN have set aside €3.6 billion (£2.44 billion) mostly for redundancy payments as they set about one of the biggest culls ever in European financial services. The UK, where most of the combined bank’s 217,000 jobs are based, is likely to be where the axe falls most deeply.

Bob Diamond, head of Barclays’ investment banking unit, said that he was looking for about 4,500 job cuts, one third in customer-facing operations and two thirds in the back office.

Chris Lucas, Barclays’ finance director, said that there was also great scope for job cuts in the retail division. In IT, there was significant overlap of platforms, while the combined bank would take advantage of ABN’s “outstanding model for offshoring operations”.

The banks were aware that the cuts would have “difficult consequences for a number of staff” and would honour all agreements with unions. The job losses envisaged were equivalent to normal staff turnover over the course of the year, so some cuts could be achieved through natural attrition.

ABN’s trade and payments back office system would be introduced into the Barclays network, the banks said. ABN’s card operations would be integrated under Barclaycard. Data centres would be consolidated.

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