Finance Sector Union (FSU) report
The Australian Bankers’ Association, the industry body representing 24 Australian banks, marked the beginning of Privacy Awareness Week with a media release reminding us that that one of the most valuable services that a bank can provide is to protect its customers’ privacy.
The ABA is right. Australians are concerned about the security of their private information. The Asia Pacific Privacy Authorities (APPA) published data this week reporting 78% of Australians have refused to provide personal information online.
“What are banks and insurance companies doing to protect your privacy?”
20,000 services sector jobs are being offshored every year, and since 2007 more than 6,000 Australian finance jobs have been offshored by our banks and insurance companies. Without intervention more job losses are on the way. While the companies try and make a virtue of the fact that the jobs they send offshore are not customer facing roles, what they don’t tell you is that all of the jobs they send offshore involve data-handling.
The sort of data people in these jobs handle is your sensitive financial and personal data. Your name, address, and date of birth. Your partner’s details. Your beneficiaries. Your banking and credit details. Your assets and liabilities. How much you have, and how much you owe. Your credit card number. Your drivers’ licence and your passport. It’s the sort of data that you wouldn’t want falling into the wrong hands, or used without your permission.
When it comes to privacy, Australians want to know what’s happening to their data. When we polled Australians earlier this year, 85% wanted banks and other businesses to obtain their consent before offshoring their data.
Three of our biggest banks, ANZ, NAB, and Westpac, have all offshored Australian jobs, and ANZ and NAB are still at it.
After the insurance giant Suncorp blazed the offshoring trail (not surprising given CEO Patrick Snowball achieved notoriety by offshoring thousands of jobs from British insurer Aviva) QBE are now following Suncorp’s lead by offshoring over 700 jobs to the Philippines and over 100 IT jobs to India.
Thousands of jobs that used to be done here in Australia, handling the sensitive data of hundreds of thousands – perhaps even millions - of Australian customers, are now being done offshore.
So while the ABA wants to reassure us that banks are protecting your privacy, and the Insurance Council stays silent on the issue, no one seems to be stating the obvious - Australian privacy law does not apply outside of Australia.
If our banks and insurance companies really do want to protect our privacy, the best way to do that is to keep jobs and our data in Australia.
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