Most of the cuts will fall in information technology, operations and finance, Mr Thain said in an interview with the news service in Dubai yesterday. Jobs won't be eliminated in the fixed income and commodities divisions, he said.

Unlike Merrill Lynch, BoA does not operate a significant wealth management advisory business outside its home US market, which analysts have told WealthBriefing means that there are unlikely to be job cuts in this area arising from any duplication.

Any time there is cost cutting at the big brokerage firms – whether it's cutting support staff, compliance or technology – it will have an impact on front line advisors, Mindy Diamond, CEO of Diamond Consultants, a US recruiting company specializing in Broker recruitment, told WealthBriefing.

"Brokerage advisors are always complaining about how bureaucratic it is and how everything takes a long time. They know any cost cutting at a firm like Merrill Lynch will just make things more bureaucratic and take more time to get things done," she said.

Last week, Merrill announced it had made a third-quarter loss of $5.1 billion in the third quarter, compared with a loss of $2.4 billion a year before.

"We haven't mapped it out in terms of actual numbers of people, but we are committed to saving $7 billion across the combined platforms, and that will be a challenge,'' Mr Thain said. "Between our two companies it will be clearly thousands."

Merrill Lynch has already cut more than 5,000 jobs in the past 18 months, taking its headcount to about 60,000, in an effort to rein in costs as credit markets froze.

Mr Thain said he expects those markets to thaw over the next six to twelve months after governments in Europe and the US injected trillions of dollars into banks last week to avert a financial crisis.

Additional reporting by Matthew Smith in New York.