Commonwealth Bank axes hundreds of jobs in retail services and IT

Commonwealth Bank is facing criticism after announcing it will cut over 250 roles in its consumer and business banking departments.

Commonwealth Bank is cutting over 250 roles in IT and the service department of its consumer and business banking units, following in the footsteps of Westpac, which has axed close to 500 positions in recent weeks.

A media representative for the bank said most of the positions that were being marked to go were non-consumer facing roles.

“As part of our focus on business improvement, we regularly review the skills we need and how we are organised. That means from time to time some roles and work can change or may no longer be required,” he said.

“Where a role isn’t required in its current form we work closely with our people to redeploy them into appropriate comparable roles suitable to their needs. These decisions are never easy nor are taken lightly.”

Australia’s banks are facing big pressures on costs from higher services inflation. This also follows years of higher expenses as they were forced to invest more money to update their ageing systems to increase productivity after embarrassing anti-money laundering control failures.

CBA, Australia’s largest lender, employs over 50,000 staff in total. About 50 of the retrenched roles will be IT roles.

It has a team of about 4000 people in Bengaluru, India, servicing operational and IT areas of the bank but mainly its financial crime operations, which chief executive Matt Comyn this month said was the bank’s largest operational area.

“We just simply couldn’t source all of that capability domestically, for some of the reasons that you would imagine in terms of expertise and demand over the last five years as well as a very tight labour market,” he told a parliamentary hearing on June 13.

Mr Comyn also said part of the bank’s commitment not to close any more regional branches for the next three years was to support employment in those towns.

The Finance Sector Union condemned the cuts at a time the bank’s quarterly profits had jumped 10 per cent to $2.6bn. FSU national secretary Julia Angrisano said union members at CBA were complaining about “significant workload and staffing issues” at the same time the bank was cutting more jobs.

“The jobs being lost are specialists across a range of areas and it is hard to believe that the bank can afford to lose so many experienced staff at the same time that it has a significant overwork problem across the organisation,” she said.

“It is unclear how the work of the business banking, IT and retail services can be covered with so many jobs being lost,” Ms Angrisano added.

“CBA staff are concerned that the job losses will lead to further workload problems for remaining staff, which will ultimately impact on customers,” she added.

The cuts at CBA follow those made by Sydney-based peer Westpac, which slashed more than 500 positions in mortgage ­operations, relationship banking and commercial banking as it pursued its cost-cutting strategy.