ANZ Bank to outsource 4000 jobs to Bangalore

Melbourne, Apr 24: ANZ Bank, Australia's major financial institution offering different financial services, has decided to outsource nearly 4000 back office jobs to Bangalore in India within months. Over the past couple of years, ANZ's total workforce at its technology and development facility in Bangalore has grown to 2000, and this would support the bank's Asian expansion as well the restructuring of its large Pacific operations in Fiji.

In the long term, local back-office operations could disappear in Australia, said the Bank. ANZ chief executive Mike Smith said the Bank's systems at times are somewhat archaic, even as the bank identified the costs of complying with the Anti-money-laundering and Counter-terrorism Financing Act (AML/CTF) among the reasons for a 31 million dollar increase in its group centre costs.

The bank was about 10 per cent of the way through a transformation aimed at cutting duplicate processes and re-engineering systems, The Australian quoted Mike Smith as saying.

Announcements regarding this would be made in a few months, he said. "I hope to move much of the straight-through processing and really start to build stuff like the Internet bank channel and electronic channels. So your back office disappears anyway. Process re-engineering of the back-end operations will mean using our Bangalore facilities much more. I think our systems at times are somewhat archaic. They have been basically adapted over time and are sometimes not as efficient as they could be," said Smith.

His comments did not bode well for the bank's Australian back-office staff, understood to be between 3000 and 4000.

The outsourcing of more jobs to Bangalore is a result of increase in costs under several heads of the Bank. Operating costs in its group centre increased by 31 per cent to 130 million dollars for the six months ending March compared with the corresponding period the previous year.

Similarly, a 32 per cent increase is witnessed in ANZ's software purchasing cost for the half year to March, from 60 to 79 million dollars.

ANI