Westpac to bring 1000 call centre and support jobs back to Australia

Westpac will bring 1000 support jobs back to Australia from overseas to meet a surge in customer demand for help due to the COVID-19 crisis.

Westpac is bringing 1000 call centre and support roles back to Australia.

Westpac will invest $45m a year to bring 1000 loan processing and call centre jobs back to Australia, prompting calls by the Finance Sector Union for other banks to take similar action.

Chief executive Peter King said the bank’s response times had been too slow after a surge in demand for customer assistance at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“(This) is a further step in transforming our business and mortgage operations, helping to support local employment, reducing the risk of offshore disruption, and accelerating our ability to simplify processes through digitisation,” Mr King said.

Westpac, he said, would also return all “dedicated voice roles” to Australia to enhance the capacity of its call centres.

Earlier this year, the bank suffered a worrying erosion of its mortgage market share due to the inability of third party contractors offshore to set up appropriate working-from-home arrangements in the COVID-19 lockdown period.

Delayed processing of loan applications resulted in borrowers going elsewhere.

Once the initial flood of applications for loan deferrals went through the system, volumes started to tick up again.

Westpac’s announcement of a large investment in local jobs came as The Australian reported a stinging attack by Attorney-General Christian Porter on the bank and new chairman John McFarlane over its dealings with financial crimes regulator Austrac.

Mr Porter, who warned Westpac he had the final word in signing off on any settlement between the warring parties, accused the lender of arrogance and running a PR campaign while in delicate mediation talks over millions of transgressions in anti-money laundering laws.

“Westpac has initiated a PR campaign while this matter is in mediation, and that PR campaign appears at odds with its apparent contrition shown at the time the offending was exposed,” he said.

The Attorney-General also attacked suggestions put by bankers in media articles that breaches of AML laws were “victimless”, saying they showed a fundamental failure to grasp the seriousness of the alleged offences, such as putting children “at risk”.

The Finance Sector Union urged all banks on Wednesday to start repatriating jobs that were sent offshore for cost-cutting reasons.

National secretary Julia Angrisano said the union had long campaigned against the offshoring of Australian back-office and call-centre jobs to Asia.

“COVID-19 has shown the folly of sending jobs that were once done in Australia offshore to places like India and the Philippines,” Ms Angrisano.

“We have seen too many jobs sent overseas in the name of increasing bank profits and it’s time every Australian bank and financial services institution brought those jobs home.

“There have always been concerns over the security of sending the financial information of Australian consumers offshore.”

Jobs reconstruction plan needed

Economic recovery, she said, would be a major priority for the foreseeable future, and the nation needed a reconstruction plan to get Australians into “good, well-paying jobs”.

Responding to Ms Angrisano’s call, ANZ Bank said it had a full-time workforce in India which undertook processing and other activities.

Commonwealth Bank pointed to its 2017 promise to meet customers needs through a network of local call centres in Brisbane, Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, Launceston and Hobart.

Mr King said bringing jobs back to Australia had been made possible with the changing work patterns as a result of COVID-19, as well as the upgrade to the company’s infrastructure.

“Together these have enabled our teams to operate effectively at home or in other locations when needed,” he said.

“Implementation will take about 12 months, allowing time to work through existing obligations with our overseas partners and to develop the best service model for the new jobs here in Australia.”

The jobs, he said, would be filled by existing and new employees, distributed across regional and metropolitan areas.

Westpac said it would maintain relationships with existing strategic partners offshore, particularly in certain areas of technology and operations.

Additional reporting Lachlan Moffet Gray