In July 2020, Westpac announced it is moving 1,000 jobs that are being carried out in India and the Philippines back to Australia after complications in overseas operations led to slow customer service and cost the lender valuable business during the COVID-19 pandemic. Westpac plans to fill some of the roles by re-deploying existing staff, but also plans to hire new workers to fill the positions over the next year as its obligations to overseas providers are worked through. The announcement is a further step in transforming Westpac's business and mortgage operations, helping to support local employment, reducing the risk of offshore disruption, and accelerating its ability to simplify processes through digitisation. The COVID-19 pandemic caused tens of thousands of bank employees to work from home, and these changes in work patterns, and investments in technology, meant it was possible to return the roles to Australia.
The Business Insider article about the Westpac announcement highlights that call centres became the front line of communication between customers and banks during the onset of the pandemic and were inundated with requests for payments holidays. Bank call centres globally flooded with inquiries from concerned customers about deferring payments on mortgages, credit cards and business loans. Call centres also became lifelines for high-risk and quarantined consumers who did not have an option to go into the branches that remained open. This overwhelming volume led to substantial wait times for many consumers.
Westpac's move indicates that call centres will remain paramount to customer service for the foreseeable future. The move also highlights the disconnect in customer service options between what customers want and what banks are offering on their digital platforms. Continued high call centre volume suggests that a significant number of customers are not relying on digital channels for support. And many have indicated they prefer human expertise when it comes to financial dealings, particularly during a time of crisis.
In October 2020, the National Australia Bank (NAB) announced it will recruit 500 additional business banking support roles to cope with the influx of financial assistance requested by customers impacted by the economic downturn. NAB has already added an additional 52 roles to its private banking arm and another 400 roles dedicated to customer support. More than 37,000 NAB business customers have deferred loan repayments, with the bank also supporting 6,235 loans through the federal government small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) guarantee scheme.
To meet the surge in demand for phone and online banking, CommBank reskilled support and frontline employees and added new temporary recruits from the aviation industry to help in their customer contact centres, according to their 2020 Annual Report. To help customers experiencing financial stress due to COVID-19, the Financial Assistance Solutions team more than doubled to approximately 1,500 frontline staff.
Despite the once-in-100-year challenges of dealing with a global pandemic, the Australian fintech sector is sustaining its revenue base, with more paying customers and plans for future global expansion, according to the EY FinTech Australia Census 2020. Fintechs say this moment of crisis is driving a step-change in consumer digital adoption and has adapted quickly to grasp new opportunities. This has resulted in a significant increase in consumer digital payments and transactions and the rise of the ‘buy now pay later’ sector, which has expanded at pace. This year has also seen a growth in challenger banks. These are healthy signs in an environment of extreme disruption and uncertainty, suggesting fintechs will survive this crisis and, with appropriate support, emerge invigorated. However, the sector continues to face its usual headwinds of regulatory concerns and competitive pressure. And, now in a post-pandemic world, fintechs must also contend with the added difficulties emerging from the crisis – issues such as tightening capital and the concern that consumers will return to the ‘safety’ of major institutions for their financial services needs. There is also widespread concern that large financial institutions have pivoted to focus on their customers, redeploying staff away from innovation, slowing the momentum of fintech initiatives. Before the global pandemic hit, there was a genuine feeling that, at last, financial services innovation collaboration had reached a ‘tipping point’.
The pandemic has added to the urgency of increased collaboration between employer organisations, industry and government to deliver more targeted and flexible skills development programs. The wider corporate Australia has a shared accountability to help provide people with the tools needed to upskill and reskill in line with emerging skills demand. To help fill the gap between talent supply and demand in Australia, Skill Finder, the government-funded national skills marketplace led by Adobe, has joined forces with the Commonwealth Bank to help provide more Australians with access to a wide range of free digital courses. As part of the collaboration, the free micro-skills marketplace will be incorporated into the Commonwealth Bank's digital feature ‘Benefits finder’ and ‘Benefits finder for Business’ via the CommBank app. Customers who use the features to claim government benefits and rebates will now also be guided to explore more than 2,000 free digital courses, available on Skill Finder, to obtain transferable micro-skills that may help them get back into the job market or upskill and reskill into new roles and growth sectors.
In their 2020 Annual Report the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ) reported that during March they began to experience a dramatic increase in calls to their dedicated hardship team in Australia – receiving around four years-worth of hardship applications in the space of only three months as almost 94,000 customers impacted by COVID-19 sought assistance. In response, ANZ developed COVID-19 ‘Talent Mobility Principles’, the purpose of which was to ensure they had ‘the right people, in the right locations, at the right time’, to meet customer and community needs during the pandemic. A campaign was run across Australia, New Zealand and India to help employees self-identify their skills and desire to move into critical areas of the business, such as the Customer Contact Centre. Over 1,000 hours of customised virtual training was delivered to over 700 staff across the Customer Service Operations team and branches to assist them to move temporarily to in-demand roles. ANZ also recruited approximately 185 new hardship consultants and provided over 23,000 hours of training to their Customer Connect (Hardship) team to ensure ongoing support for their customers on a COVID-19 assistance package. To help ANZ leaders support their teams through COVID-19, additional guidance was provided aligned to two of the desired leadership behaviours (referred to as ‘New Ways of Leading’), ‘Creating Shared Clarity’ and ‘Empowering People’. ANZ wants their people leaders to display these behaviours in order to inspire and engage their teams, helping them to deliver on the bank’s strategic imperatives. ANZ introduced a ‘Leading Through Change’ program for 7,500 people leaders in July, to help them lead with confidence and optimism during this period of ongoing and accelerated change. On completion, leaders are provided with new tools to support themselves and their teams to improve focus, adapt faster and be more productive.
ANZ are continuing to develop priority capabilities aligned with their strategy and aimed at ‘future-proofing’ their workforce – data and engineering are two key capabilities of focus. ANZ recruited more than 500 software and systems engineers over the course of the year. The COVID-19 pandemic has had little effect on supply of this capability in the market and critical engineering talent remains scarce. In response, ANZ are investing in innovative recruitment strategies and have a dedicated team working on talent marketing, proactive sourcing and continuous improvement of the recruitment approach. ANZ have continued to invest in the capabilities of their people through the provision of training and development programs. Almost 970,000 hours of learning were delivered in 2020, including over 530,000 hours of compliance training. Our Way of Learning (OWL), ANZ’s digital social learning platform, enabled employees to access learning materials relevant to their current roles and future career aspirations while working from home. The ability to access digital content anywhere, anytime and on any device led to a 29% increase in self-directed content access across the bank.
The Westpac Group's 2020 Annual Report also highlighted extensive workforce development undertaken during the pandemic. Westpac provided a range of structured and self-paced learning experiences, including virtual coaching support to help bankers have great customer conversations and deepen relationships. Westpac also partnered with leading universities to offer employees a range of micro-credentials in disciplines such as risk, lending and service. Over 2,000 leaders completed training in the early intervention and prevention of mental ill-health, and the importance of supportive leadership. The Board attended a training workshop led by industry experts to discuss climate change risks, investor expectations and directors' duties.
