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St George established a "partnership" with IT giant IBM for back-office processing, including activities being carried out offshore, to remain competitive attendees at the bank's annual general meeting in Sydney were told today.
St George chairman John Thame said the bank entered the relationship with IBM -- announced in September -- as part of a strategic review that acknowledged the IT company could do some things better than the bank could.
It would free up bank staff to develop customer contact functions, according to Thame.
However, the bank is committed to maintaining its customer call centres in Australia.
Thame said the bank had to take this course to remain competitive.
He said any of St George's employees affected by offshoring was guaranteed a position within the group, if they wanted it.
Thame said St George currently employed over 8,500 Australians and, over the past five years, it had increased staff by over 1,000.
"You have our assurance that every permanent employee of St George who has been impacted by offshoring has been guaranteed a position with the group on equivalent terms and conditions, if they wish to take it," he said.
Describing "offshoring" as "a sensitive issue", Thame said St George expected to continue growing its Australian workforce.
The IBM arrangement was part of a strategic review that would allow St George to benefit through both improved service quality and enhanced productivity, according to Thame.
"A key consequence of this partnership with IBM is that St George is able to focus even more strongly on growing and developing our customer facing activities and effectively addressing an increasingly competitive Australian banking market, where a number of participants are large institutions with operations in many countries," he said.
"Many, both Australian and international companies, already have outsourcing partnerships in place delivering scale in IT and business processes. This point about being competitive really matters. In this highly and increasingly competitive environment, the long-term survival of our bank requires that we look at, and if necessary adopt, initiatives of this type. This is a reality of our situation.
"At St George, we are committed to increasing the number of relationship managers, residential lenders, business bankers, financial planners, branch staff and customer service specialists across our business.
"We are similarly committed to providing the leadership, management and technical training to support staff in these highly skilled roles. We are also committed to retaining our customer service call centres in Australia," he added.
St George had over 750 staff in call centres, primarily at Kogarah and Parramatta, in Sydney.
Thame said shareholders can be assured that customer data records are absolutely secure. He noted that it was a key aspect in St. George's role as a bank and that it took security very seriously. According to Thame, St George has strict security standards and policies in place to protect its customers.
He said the arrangements with IBM complied with Australian privacy laws, which required IBM to meet exactly the same standards of data security and data protection as apply to St George.
"The Bank has also taken extra security steps beyond what is required by Australia's privacy laws to ensure that any customer data handled by IBM is treated with the same, or an even greater level of confidentiality, security and sensitivity as it is by St George in Australia," Thame said.
"All central customer records are securely held in Australia. We would never undertake any measure that compromises our customers' data."
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