National Australia Bank boss warns jobs will be cut, but customer support to increase

Ross McEwan says while some specialist jobs will go to lower costs, the bank will add hundreds of roles to support customers.

Ahead of Friday’s trading update Mr McEwan stressed that the bank had to become “far more efficient and simpler”. Picture: Hollie Adams for The Australian

National Australia Bank chief executive Ross McEwan has stressed the critical importance of lowering costs, revealing that an unspecified number of jobs will go, but hundreds of others will be added to support customers.

In an email to all staff ahead of NAB’s third quarter trading update on Friday, Mr McEwan again stressed that the bank had to become “far more efficient and simpler”.

This meant prioritising 19 key projects, stopping some work and cutting roles that were no longer necessary.

“At the same time we are creating hundreds of new roles with an emphasis on how we can better support our customers,” the NAB chief said.

Reminding staff of last week’s internal briefing, also delivered to all staff, Mr McEwan said the new jobs would be in such areas as NAB Assist, across the business and private banking division, and in the anti-money laundering and know-your-customer compliance operations.

Staff could also be retrained for customer-facing roles.

The email followed a media report on Wednesday which said NAB was poised to sack hundreds of IT workers after the bank’s advice earlier this year that it would jettison about 100 projects.

The report, which was based on internal emails, said technology and operations boss Patrick Wright had instituted a hiring freeze, cancelled outstanding offers of employment and suspended previously approved roles.

The job losses were part of a move to centralise functions and create clearer lines of accountability as part of a strategy to support customers through the COVID-19 crisis, which has hit NAB’s home state of Victoria particularly hard after the imposition of a stage four lockdown.

Mr McEwan unveiled his long-term strategy in the April interim result.

While inroads had been made into removing complexity and improving digitisation, he said at the time that NAB needed to go further in providing simpler, easier and faster outcomes for customers.

A key short-term priority was to further streamline its products and processes, particularly in home and business lending, and support a smoother transition to digitisation over the medium-term.

In his email on Wednesday, the NAB boss told staff they should not lose sight of the need to position the bank for the long-term.

Since April, he said, the bank had aligned its businesses with a new structure, appointed senior leaders and handed them end-to-end accountability for getting the job done.

“These changes have been flowing through the different business divisions and will continue for a little while yet,” Mr McEwan said.

“I’m aware that this creates anxiety and is impacting our colleagues.

“My ask of everyone and particularly of our people leaders is to do this with care, compassion and support and as quickly as possible to provide our colleagues with certainty in what is an incredibly uncertain world.”