In a boost for the Australia job market, Westpac will bring back around 1,000 jobs to Australia from overseas to improve its operations and customer support.
The decision was a result of demand for customer assistance at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which created challenging conditions for home lending processing and call centres which needed to be addressed.
The new roles would support Westpac’s call centres, as well as providing processing and operation assistance to functions like home lending and consumer finance.
Peter King, Westpac chief executive, said the announcement was a further step in transforming the business, helping support local employment, reducing the risk of offshore disruption, and accelerating the simplification of processes through digitisation.
“We will also be returning all dedicated voice roles to Australia to enhance the capacity of our existing call centres; this will mean when a customer calls us, it will be answered by someone in Australia,” King said.
“Bringing jobs back to Australia has been made possible with the changing work patterns in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, as well as the upgrade to our technology infrastructure over recent years.
“Together these have enabled our teams to operate effectively at home or in other locations when needed.”
The new roles would become part of a more distributed workforce structure across Australia with implementation expected to take 12 months.
The implementation would allow enough time to work through existing obligations with overseas partners, as well as develop an appropriate service model for the new jobs.
“We plan to fill the roles with new and existing employees, with the jobs distributed across regional and metro areas,” King said.
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