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“I hate to do this, but … it’s for the future of the company,” Matos said.
The lender is taking a $560 million pre-tax charge in its first-half results to pay for the redundancies.
The Finance Sector Union, which has been in urgent talks with ANZ over Matos’ restructuring plan in recent weeks, slammed the cuts as “unhinged” and driven by “pure greed”. ANZ made $3.6 billion in profit during its latest six-month period.
“ANZ is betraying 3500 workers in one of the world’s most profitable banking sectors, cutting jobs simply to chase even bigger profits. This is out of control – it’s not strategy, it’s unhinged,“ Finance Sector Union president Wendy Streets said.
“When the FSU asked ANZ who will actually do the work of the 3500 sacked staff, the bank had no answer, except to say the work will simply stop. That’s not a plan, that’s chaos.”
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Matos denied the move was about lifting returns – though analysts from Citi said the announcement signalled the bank’s plan for productivity and efficiency.
Matos said: “This is not about profits. This is about getting the things right, the basic things that the bank needs to do, right.”
The union said it would challenge the bank at the Fair Work Commission.
The announcement was an unavoidable topic of conversation as workers at the Docklands Melbourne headquarters filed out for their lunches and morning coffee orders on Tuesday.
One employee said his team was briefed about coming redundancies a few weeks ago, and that he was told his team in the institutional banking sector would not be heavily affected.
Staff morale has fallen at ANZ bank, which is based in Melbourne.Credit: Paul Rovere
Other employees said they found out about the cuts in a staff email on Tuesday morning, and had not yet been told exactly how their teams would be impacted.
While several said it was unsettling for morale, another long-term employee said he wasn’t too concerned as his team absorbed several redundancies in the restructure 18 months ago.
“It’s just business as usual. Until we know, you can’t worry about it,” he said, commenting on the morale in the team he worked for.
The cuts come two weeks after ANZ made an embarrassing email error in its restructuring efforts, accidentally informing some staff members who were to be made redundant about the process for returning their laptops before they had been told they were losing their jobs.
ANZ’s announcement on Tuesday did not provide details of which parts of the bank the job cuts would come from, but Citi analyst Thomas Strong said he thought the bank’s retail banking division and its technology functions were likely to be affected.
Credit: Matt Golding
Analysts, including Strong, have predicted ANZ will announce changes to its digital platform, ANZ Plus, which is costly and has been regarded as underwhelming by financial markets.
Matos is set to update the market on ANZ’s strategy at a briefing on October 13, and analysts have also predicted he could announce new financial return targets for the bank.
“ANZ has well signalled a strategic shift under Nuno Matos, which would be detailed at a strategy day in October,” Strong said.
“In that sense, it is unsurprising that the ‘bad news’ in the upfront cost has been delivered … before management can focus on better medium-term returns in October.”
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