The Commonwealth Bank has cut hundreds of Australian jobs while expanding its India-based workforce, a fortnight after recording a half-yearly net profit of $5.367 billion.
The axing of about 300 jobs will affect Australian workers across retail, business and institutional banking, and human resources, but IT roles will be the hardest hit, the Finance Sector Union (FSU) said.
At the same time the bank has advertised to fill almost 100 positions in India during the past month alone, with most based at the bank’s Bangalore technology hub, despite criticism for doing the same thing last year after making hundreds of redundancies in Australia.
In August CBA admitted in August that 700 of out 2,000 IT engineers hired over the preceding 12 months were located in Bangalore, and it grew its India-based workforce by 21% to 6,788 in the year to June 2025, a 138% increase since 2022.
The FSU criticised the job cuts, and said the bank should strengthen redeployment, retraining and redundancy protections for workers.
“At a time when CBA has just posted over $5 billion in half yearly profit, cutting the jobs of 300 workers is totally unacceptable,” National Secretary Julia Angrisano said.
“For years we have seen CBA continue to axe hundreds upon hundreds of jobs while raking in billions in profits – we’ve heard countless stories of CBA workers being tossed onto the redundancy pile and having to fend for themselves at the whim of the bank.
“These are the very workers who helped generate CBA’s massive profits. The least the bank can do is retrain and reskill workers, and provide opportunities for them to remain at CBA.”
As of October last year the National Australia Bank also has more than 1,000 employees in Gurugram, near Delhi, with 127 more tech jobs set to be sent to India and Vietnam, while Westpac is also outsourcing roles to India and the Philippines.
Earlier this month telecommunications giant Telstra told staff it was planning to axe up to 650 jobs and outsource the roles to a technology firm in India.
Both the Commonwealth Bank and Telstra were government owned before beginning privatisation in 1991 and 1997 respectively.
Header image: Left, one of CBA’s Sydney offices (CBA). Right, the CBA Bangalore office (Google Maps).
