CEO Dan Huggins says BNZ's following its own growth path, rather than Aussie parent NAB's job cutting restructure

CEO Dan Huggins says BNZ has no plans for job cuts or offshoring jobs along the lines of those recently outlined by its parent, National Australia Bank (NAB).

NAB plans to cut up to 2,500 jobs, or about 6% of its workforce, in Australia over the next year as part of a corporate and technology restructure. It's also hiring for 172 jobs in Asia, leading to accusations it's seeking cheaper overseas labour and ramping up AI use.

The Australian Financial Review recently reported NAB is spending more than A$300 million a year on building up its Indian workforce and is encouraging senior leaders to hire more staff offshore. According to the AFR, NAB’s Indian workforce increased 54% to 4534 in the March year. Meanwhile in Australia, the AFR says some 3200 NAB staff have to compete with their colleagues for half as many jobs.

Speaking to interest.co.nz after BNZ posted its annual financial results on Thursday, Huggins said BNZ wasn't planning to follow NAB's job cutting or offshoring lead in New Zealand.

"We don't have any plans along those lines. We're looking to continue to grow the bank. We're going to need more people in New Zealand to serve customers as we're growing the bank," Huggins says.

"The announcements that NAB have made relate to the Australian business, not to New Zealand. We operate the business here given the conditions in the New Zealand market, and those conditions are quite different from Australia. So those announcements that NAB have made relate to the Australian business only."

Earlier this week Callum Francis, National Organiser for Finance at the Workers First Union, told interest.co.nz union members "are concerned that BNZ will continue to offshore NZ jobs in the immediate future, especially considering NAB is already putting profit before people and selling local work to foreign companies."

Last year BNZ confirmed plans to shift 40 to 50 lending services jobs from NZ to Accenture in India.

Francis describes offshoring as; "a breach of a company's social responsibility. It’s nothing more than getting cheap labour at the cost of locals and our futures...taking advantage of salary and cost-of-living differences in other countries at the expense of their local customer base."

Huggins says in the September year BNZ increased full-time equivalent (FTEs) staff by 112 in NZ to 5,476. BNZ has "several hundred" people working for it overseas, but this is separate from NAB's operations.

"Under BS11, it's not within NAB's operations," Huggins says.

BS11 is the Reserve Bank's outsourcing policy, under which the big NZ banks must have the legal and practical ability themselves to control and execute outsourced functions such as information technology (IT) processing, accounting and call centres.

Meanwhile, Huggins says BNZ's September year return on equity was 10.2%, down from 11% the previous year. Including changes to BNZ's accounting process relating to its software capitalisation policy that reduced profit by $253 million, Huggins says the return on equity was 8.3%.

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