(Bloomberg) -- ABN Amro Group NV raised a target for profitability and signaled it may pay a higher dividend as it holds the first investor day since its IPO in 2015.

• ABN Amro aims to bring the cost-income ratio below 55 percent by 2022, from a current target of 56 percent to 58 percent, according to a statement Friday. The bank said it’s “well-placed to consider additional dividends.”

Key Insights

• The lender increased efficiency in recent years by slashing jobs, including at senior management level, and closing down branches at its retail unit.
• But job cuts at the top didn’t go without complaints. An anonymous group of 21 ABN Amro employees expressed their concern over the bank’s strategy in a letter in June. Chief Executive Officer Kees van Dijkhuizen blamed dissatisfaction within the bank partly on “disappointment” that some people “didn’t get the job they wanted.”
• A higher dividend has been anticipated by investors after the bank set aside 60 percent of profit this year for dividends. The payout ratio was 50 percent last year.

Digging deeper

• The Amsterdam-based bank has one of the strongest capital buffers among peers, but that measure will drop significantly under new accounting rules that require a higher buffer of mortgages, ABN Amro’s biggest revenue source. It said it didn’t change its current target for a CET 1 ratio of 17.5 percent to 18.5 percent.
• Once one of the world’s largest banks, ABN refocused on its consumer lending business in the Netherlands after it was bailed out in 2009. The government still owns a large stake that it plans to sell down over time.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ruben Munsterman in Amsterdam at rmunsterman1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Dale Crofts at dcrofts@bloomberg.net, Christian Baumgaertel

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