1,000 jobs to go at Dresdner and DKW

Tonight may be a sleepless one for investment bankers at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein before tomorrow's restructuring by its parent, the German insurance giant Allianz.

Michael Diekmann, Allianz's chief executive, is to unveil a shake-up of its banking operations that could see about 1,000 jobs go across Dresdner Bank and DKW. Most cuts are likely to be made at Dresdner Bank, which employs about 28,000 workers and is Germany's third biggest bank behind Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank.

Some jobs may go at DKW in London, where about half of its 5,500-odd workers are based.

The job losses come in a week when the insurer Royal & SunAlliance unveiled plans to axe about 1,000 jobs in the UK, and a merger of the network businesses of the Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia and Germany's Siemens cost up to 9,000 more across Europe.

Yesterday, the London-listed South African financial services group Old Mutual said it planned to cut up to 800 jobs at Skandia, the Swedish insurer it acquired earlier this year.

Tomorrow's restructuring by Allianz is likely to see the Wasserstein name dropped from the title of it its investment bank.

Last year, Dresdner signalled a possible name-change for the investment bank when it was combined with Dresdner's corporate banking business.

DKW adopted the moniker in 2000 after swallowing Wasserstein Perella, the boutique investment bank founded 12 years earlier by the legendary Wall Street dealmakers "bid-em-up" Bruce Wasserstein and Joseph Perella.