CBA to send 100 technology and compliance roles to India

The Commonwealth Bank will offshore technology, compliance and service roles to India starting early next year, sparking anger from the finance union who say more than 100 local jobs will be lost during the pandemic.

CBA opened its Bangalore office in 2019 and executive Simon Birch informed staff last month of plans to relocate Australian jobs to that centre in India as the bank struggles to find talent locally.

Mr Birch emailed the Payment Services Utility team, responsible for the payment-related technology, operations, governance and service management, on July 27 to unveil plans to “build and scale up” capabilities in India.

CBA will send key compliance and technology roles from its payments team to India starting next year. Credit: Glenn Campbell

The email, obtained by The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, details plans to create an equal-sized team in India to access talent not available in Australia, and warned of job losses across at least six roles, including compliance, investigations and card disputes.

“For the group to deliver our refreshed strategy of ‘building tomorrow’s bank today for our customers’, we need to be able to access world-class capability and highly-specialised talent,” Mr Birch said. “And CBA India enables us to do this.”

CBA’s jobs page lists more than 100 financial crime compliance roles also available in India, with only a handful of these positions listed in Australia. The bank’s decision to grow its Indian workforce comes amid a fierce war for talent between the nation’s biggest banks.

CBA’s chief risk officer Nigel Williams said in June there was a major shortage of skilled resources in Australia, and called on the university sector to build up local capabilities in the financial compliance industry.

The Finance Sector Union labelled CBA’s decision to offshore payment roles as a cost-cutting exercise, with national secretary Julia Angrisano claiming it was a “disgrace” to make staff redundant during the coronavirus pandemic.

“It is disappointing for our members that despite the CBA making $8.65 billion in profits, the bank’s management is still prepared to slash jobs and risk customer service standards in pursuit of more profits,” she said. “We can’t afford to lose highly experienced staff and replace them with foreign workers with no experience of the CBA’s operations.”

Mr Birch said affected employees would be consulted over the remainder of the year, with support provided to assist applications for alternate roles within the bank, including “high-growth areas in Australia such as financial crime operations”.

“I wanted to take this opportunity to reiterate that CBA will always have a large and sophisticated workforce in Australia, and remains committed to supporting and investing in our people,” he said.

A CBA spokesman added the bank spent $1.8 billion on technology last financial year, and would recruit “thousands of people” over the next 12 months. “We remain committed to having our customer-facing roles, such as branch and customer call centres, in Australia and to supporting and investing in our people wherever they are located.”

“The proposed shift of around 100 roles announced in July reflects the reality that we need global experience to deliver our strategy. And by having teams working in a different time-zone we can extend our operations window to both resolve issues and innovate.”

Major bank ANZ began shifting its back-office staff from China to India in March, which insiders said was an attempt to tap into the cheaper labour market. ANZ has long offshored staff to India, with around 5000 operations and 2000 tech staff there to support its businesses across Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

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