NAB offshores IT jobs in skills hunt

The National Australia Bank (NAB) has awarded IT services contracts to Indian outsourcing giants Infosys and Satyam, in a move which may threaten Australian IT staff.

NAB currently has 300 staff working in the areas the bank is planning to outsource including testing, maintenance and automation, SAP software development, enterprise information management and global cache service middleware.

A spokesperson for NAB said while "we do expect there will be some impacts", the bank could not say how many jobs could be retained though redeployment. In the last two years, NAB has offshored 374 positions.

The spokesperson added that the move would cut costs for NAB: "I would say that we [will] experience significant savings, not just as a result of the contract, but also as a result of the efficiencies that we will obtain."

However, the spokesperson also attributed the move to a skills shortage, saying: "The skills we are looking at are core skills in those companies, and not necessarily skills that are easily accessible in Australia."

The bank selected its outsourcing partners on "process efficiency, their ability to track and log processes, the economies of scale they can bring," and their "ability to ramp up and down at peak times", the spokesperson said.