The Dutch government has agreed to sell a 7% stake in ABN Amro through an accelerated bookbuilding process.

NL Financial Investments (NLFI), which owns the majority stake in ABN Amro on behalf of the government, has agreed to offload 65 million shares in the banks.

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The latest move would dilute the government’s stake in the Dutch lender to 70% from 77%. The government plans to sell the remaining stake in the bank over time.

Meanwhile, the bank has announced plans to reduce its headcount by 1,500, in a bid to reduce costs and invest in digital services.

The redundancies will lead to another €400m in savings by 2020, and comes on top of the existing job cut plans announced by the bank.

Overall, the measures will trim the bank's workforce by nearly 13% from 26,500 in 2015 to about 23,000 in 2020.

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The bank said that it will book a provision of €150m to €175m for the new layoffs in the fourth quarter of 2016.

ABN Amro chairman CEO Gerrit Zalm said: “Even though we aim to limit the number of redundancies as much as possible and new positions will be created, the ABN AMRO workforce is expected to go down by about 10%. The number of external staff is expected to go down by 25-30%.”