ANZ Bank's tech jobs safe for now

IT staff at the ANZ Bank are likely to breathe a sigh of relief today after the bank confirmed to ZDNet Australia this morning that there were no fixed plans to include them as part of a round of forced redundancies.

The bank told 130 back office staff yesterday afternoon that their roles were set to disappear in the first round of redundancies for 2012. Analysts believe that the redundancy plan is a move to make one-off reductions to the bank's operating costs.

ANZ Bank said this morning that the roles slashed yesterday are from the organisation's commercial and retail operations business — a separate division to ANZ's technology hubs situated in the Asia-Pacific region.

The bank couldn't confirm or deny more redundancies in future, however, saying only that ANZ Bank CEO Phil Chronican had met with the Financial Services Union to discuss the way forward. ANZ said that it's still too early to speculate how many jobs may or may not go in 2012 and where they will come from.

The bank recently reaffirmed its commitment to its technology future by laying out its IT roadmap for the next five years. The plan, set to be spearheaded by bank CIO Anne Weatherston, will see ANZ focus on four key pillars including improving customer connectivity, leveraging existing systems to get better information and standardising the back-end infrastructure while focussing on customer centricity.

ANZ has also recently hired a new executive into the fold — chief operating officer Alistair Currie — to sit on the board and look after technology, shared services and the bank's regional IT hubs in Bangalore, Manila and Chengdu.