Westpac hiring spree coming to an end
Westpac added another 482 staff to its Technology team in the half to 31 March 2011, mostly for its Strategic Investment Priorities program, but the bank has indicated that it will be slowing its recruitment.
This increase continued a hiring spree by the company, which has seen a rise in technology resources by 1254 staff compared with the first half of last year.
However, this rise will likely level out now, according to Westpac CEO Gail Kelly, who said that the bank had probably "done quite a bit of the ramp up" in terms of number of staff.
"I wouldn't see the same ramp-up in staff numbers as we've had in recent times."
Staff skill sets of contractors might change, as different specialties are required, but there will not be the same level of increase, according to the executive.
When asked how Westpac is dealing with the problem of hiring staff when so many of the banks are carrying out IT projects, Kelly said that IT skills do "come at a premium".
"There may well be some wage pressures that emerge here," she said, adding, however, that wages were not rising beyond expectations yet.
The strategic investment priority program, which was signed off by the board in 2009 and was started in 2010, is 18 months into its five-year schedule and is "absolutely on track", according to Kelly.
During this half, the bank has improved branches and contact centres, enabling customers to deposit cash without deposit slips, installed a new desktop application in call centres which aggregates 46 systems into one, installed a collections case handling platform which consolidates customer information into one system and improved telecommunications between branches and operations centres.
St George Bank and Bank SA credit cards were also migrated onto the Westpac Group target cards platform, another step towards having a single cards platform, while new deposit products were introduced.
An integrated trade platform has been delivered for all the Westpac bands, and all merchant terminals, ATMs and EFTPOS have been migrated onto one platform.
Upgrade work on datacentres continues.