Westpac spent $45 million bringing more than 1,000 jobs back to the country – a decision CEO Peter King says helped the bank navigate recent lockdowns
Westpac says its decision to spend $45 million last year to bring more than 1,000 loan processing jobs back to Australia was the right move.
The bank said the decision helped it deal with recent COVID-19 lockdowns without disruption, The Australian reported.
“We could have been impacted if our team had [still] been in India,” Westpac CEO Peter King told The Australian.
According to Westpac, 1,075 customer service jobs – 75 more than originally planned – have been relocated to Australia, spread across call centres in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.
The jobs include mortgage and business loan processing, assisting in hardship cases, and fraud investigation, The Australian reported.
Disruptions due to previous lockdowns in the Philippines and India were the source of major headaches for the bank, leading to falling loan volumes and a loss of market share to competitors. However, Westpac said last week that its mortgage and business credit growth had recovered to be in line with the average for the banking system.
“For me, it’s important for roles to be in the right places. That’s been one of the lessons from COVID – the importance of resilience of supply chains, and that’s the reason we moved early,” King told The Australian. “COVID has resulted in some of the highest levels of customer contact we have seen, and the new roles focus on helping our customers manage the impact of the pandemic for both themselves and their businesses. We continue to make changes that bolster how we support customers, and we will shortly have 100% of our customer calls answered by someone in Australia.”
King said the economy was performing relatively well considering the ongoing lockdowns. While credit card spending was down, he said the drop was “nowhere near as much” as in previous lockdowns.
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King told The Australian that it was vital to raise vaccination rates in the country.
“It’s important to stick with the plan to reopen that was set out by national cabinet,” he said. “It’s not so much the number of [COVID] cases that’s key, but the number of people who need extra care. “If I look at vaccination rates in NSW, 61.5% of people have had their first jabs, and it’s growing by one-and-a-bit percentage points a day, so it will only be 10 days beforethe state reaches the 70% vaccination threshold. It’s a bit less than a one-percentage-point daily increase in the second jabs, but we’re likely to get to 70% by the end of October.”
King told The Australian that 10,000 Westpac employees work in NSW’s most severely affected local government areas, representing a sizable proportion of the local workforce.
