Australia's leading bank Westpac said on Tuesday it was scrutinising the possibility of outsourcing jobs to India.
Westpac is looking at the advantages of 'doing some work in India', Westpac spokesman David Lording said in Melbourne on Tuesday.
"Main area of such offshoring would be the basic administrative processing," the spokesman said adding "We believe the best approach is to do it in reasonably small pieces to ensure that there is no disruption."
However, he said no final decision on job transfer has been made till now.
"We have successfully outsourced a number of functions over the last five years including mortgage servicing, cheque processing and data processing," Lording said.
"Any further outsourcing will be a continuation of this process as it needs to be built on using partners that can more efficiently perform operations where we have no comparative advantage," he added.
Westpac would continue to employ more people in customer service areas. Where possible we look to retrain and redeploy people to other areas of the bank thereby minimising the number of job losses, he said.
The leading Australian bank has aready outsourced a number of functions to India
According to media reports, another leading bank ANZ, which employs 1000 people in software development in Bangalore, is conducting studies for its personal banking businesses and this could lead to further expansion of the bank's Indian presence.
National Australia Bank and Commonwealth Bank in particular, are moving more slowly on the offshoring front too.
Last September, National Australia Bank signed an agreement with Accenture resulting in the shifting of 23 back-office jobs to Bangalore as part of a pilot programme.
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