ANZ Bank says it will cut around 1,000 permanent jobs in the next four months as its profits are squeezed by higher costs, tighter regulation and a drop in lending.

The positions affected would be in middle management as well as back-office and support roles, the bank said, with customer-service staff mostly unaffected.

The bank today told workers of 492 confirmed job losses.

ANZ chief executive Australia Philip Chronican said the bank had to adapt to a difficult environment and become more lean, more agile and more customer-focused.

"In this environment, the right thing to do is to be upfront with our staff and with the community about the changes needed in banking and their implications," Mr Chronican said.

"We are acutely conscious of the impact of these reductions on individual staff members and we will be making every effort to use natural attrition, to redeploy staff and to utilise our training funds to support those people affected.

"Although we need to make difficult decisions in the short-term to adapt to the new global environment for banks, the economic outlook for Australia remains positive and this helps underpin our continued investment in customer service and in emerging areas of opportunity."

ANZ said affected staff would receive assistance to find jobs elsewhere in the organisation and would have access to training and financial support.

As part of the cost-cutting measures, the bank also said most senior executives' salaries would remain fixed for the rest of the 2012 financial year.

Federal Financial Services Minister Bill Shorten says the banks are misguided if they think cutting jobs or sending them offshore is a remedy for their problems.

But he told Sky News he welcomed the efforts ANZ had made to protect those who will lose their jobs.

"ANZ perhaps has set a new standard for redundancies, which I think has been overlooked in the discussion," Mr Shorten said.

"They're now providing individual training accounts of up to $10,000."

'This is about greed'

The bank held a meeting about the job losses with Finance Sector Union (FSU) officials at its Melbourne headquarters this morning.

FSU national secretary Leon Carter said the move was unnecessary and was designed simply to make more money for the bank's upper echelons.

"This is an incredibly profitable, iconic Australian employer that can afford to keep every single one of these workers in place and continue to make a multi-billion-dollar profit," he said.

"This is about greed and greed at the expense of workers."

The FSU says the Federal Government should make the bank deposit guarantee conditional on there being no further job cuts.

"These workers are being sacrificed so bonuses can be made and so rich institutional investors can make more money out of speculation on the share market," Mr Carter said.

"These workers are doing jobs every single day that the bank needs. This is nothing more than a short-term decision to make more money for rich people at the expense of ordinary workers."

ANZ has around 24,000 workers in Australia and 49,000 worldwide.

Last month ANZ said about 130 back-office positions would be made redundant in the bank's commercial and retail businesses.

Earlier this month Westpac announced that around 560 positions would be affected by job cuts, including 100 positions that would be sent offshore as part of a productivity drive.

And some 170 jobs at the Australian arm of the Royal Bank of Scotland are expected to disappear after the British bank announced 3,500 jobs would go at its operations worldwide.

Analysts at UBS expect some 7,000 jobs to go in the sector in Australia alone in the next two years.

The major banks are seeking to rein in their costs as growth in lending slows and funding costs rise, which they have attributed to the eurozone's sovereign debt problems.