The Charlotte area will lose up to 4,000 Wachovia Corp. jobs as Citigroup Inc. combines functions with the locally based bank.

That’s an estimate by banking analyst Nancy Atkinson of the Aite Group of Boston.

“Citigroup wants to save $3 billion” by integrating the two banks, Atkinson says. “A lot of that does have to come from staff.”

All told, 7,000 jobs will be cut from the two banks as they’re merged, Atkinson estimates.

Citigroup (NYSE:C) has agreed to pay $2.16 billion for Charlotte-based Wachovia’s banking operations in a deal that’s expected to be complete at year’s end. Integration — the process by which the two bank’s systems and employees would be merged into a single bank — would take until late 2010.

Atkinson’s numbers differ slightly from banking expert Tony Plath’s figures. On Monday, he estimated that 3,000 Charlotte-area Wachovia employees would lose their jobs with the merger.

Plath, a UNC Charlotte finance professor, says the most cut will be in areas where function overlap between the two banks.

Atkinson agrees. Those overlaps will include lots of back-office functions such as shared services, human resources, marketing and other administrative personnel.

In the Mid-Atlantic states where the “footprints” of the two banking giants touch each other, some branches will probably be closed, Atkinson says. “If there are branches sitting pretty much on top of each other, they will make a choice to close one or the other.”

However, Citigroup spokesman Rob Julavits says duplication represents only about 5 percent of the branches. “There’s very little overlap there.”

That means that slightly more than 200 or those banking offices will be shuttered.

Julavits declines to answer other questions about layoffs. “It’s really too early to get any of the specifics of the integration which will happen next year,” he says.

In the Charlotte area, Wachovia (NYSE:WB) employs about 20,000 of its 120,000 workers. About 10,000 of those are reported to be at the bank’s Customer Information Center in the University City area.

Citigroup has about 374,000 employees.

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