With Australia's oldest banks planning to outsource work, a union representing bank employees has said this may lead to the personal bank data of thousands of customers, including Prime Minister Johan Howard, moving to India.
The Westpac bank is preparing to announce deep cuts to the 485-strong workforce in a cost-cutting drive, according to Workers at Westpac's Transactions and Unsecured Lending Operations centre.
The Finance Sector Union said such a decision to move work offshore would expose the personal bank data of thousands of Westpac customers to offshore operators not covered by Australian privacy laws.
Among those customers, the union said, could be John Howard, who had described himself as a "modest, but nonetheless faithful and long-standing customer of the bank".
A Westpac spokesman said that while no firm decisions had been taken, the bank was having a "preliminary look at those particular functions and whether they could be done more efficiently by external partners".
"With the entry of global players into the Australian financial market, would we have to be as efficient as possible in order to compete with them," spokesman David Lording said.
"All Westpac customers now face the possibility of having some of their financial information held offshore, with or without their permission, and with or without appropriate consumer and privacy safeguards," the union's secretary, Geoff Derrick, said.
Westpac is not alone among Australian banks in looking to move processing and IT tasks offshore. ANZ maintains more than a thousand IT staff in India.
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