National Australia Bank (NAB) is considering shifting a further 400 technology jobs to offshore service providers in India, according to press reports.
NAB is currently offshoring around 374 mainly back office jobs to offshore centres, mostly in India.
However, according to a report by The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) documents available on NAB's intranet state that the bank hired outsourcing specialist TPI earlier this year to consider options for three of its IT units. Indian firms Infosys, Satyam, IBM and Accenture are all thought to have submitted proposals.
Jobs that could be offshored include enterprise information management and software development using SAP, both in the enterprise services technology unit and the testing of NAB's Australian banking operations, says the report. Those units currently employ about 410 staff.
An NAB spokeswoman told reporters that not all those jobs would be affected by the plan. She said the documents detailing offshoring developments were available internally to keep employees informed.
But the uncertainty about which jobs might go has caused anxiety within the bank's 2700-strong IT workforce.
Another internal document seen by SMH is a question-and-answer document relating to a meeting of NAB's IT staff in June that states every IT position could be assessed over time.
In the Q&A the bank also says it would prefer to multi-source jobs to a number of providers, rather than opting for large and complete outsourcing deals such as those carried out by Commonwealth Bank and Westpac.
Scenarios discussed at the expo would cut NAB's 2700-strong internal domestic IT staff to as few as 200, says the SMH report. However a bank spokesman has stressed that these scenarios were concepts only.
He said 374 back office jobs had been sent overseas in the past two years and in that time NAB had added about 900 jobs to its Australian workforce.