Next Steps in ANZ National business transformation

Please find attached a short media advisory in relation to a business announcement made to staff earlier today.

The Finsec comments in reaction to this are incorrect; we have not made any reference to the number of jobs affected, and our redeployment commitment means that no-one affected by this initiative need lose their jobs.

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www.anznational.co.nz

MEDIA ADVISORY

INFORMATION FOR MEDIA (2 pages)

Thursday 17 April 2008

Next Steps in ANZ National’s business transformation

ANZ National has today informed staff that it is taking the next step in its wider business transformation programme.

Background

This is the next stage of an ongoing programme of investment and transformation in our business which has included:

• Increasing our customer representation by investing in 11 new branches and 80 new ATMs, growing the number of customer facing staff, and increasing the resources in relationship management roles.

• Making significant investments in technology, including our consumer finance, direct banking and telling platforms.

• Sharpening our customer propositions, and introducing new services and products and taking them to market with good effect.

• Making customer service and process improvements as a result of our investment in Lean Six Sigma methodologies.

• In the last three years we’ve added an extra 800 new staff to the Bank as we’ve grown our business.

Our Current Initiative

Today we announced to our staff that over the next 18 months we are planning to make greater use of our ANZ facility in Bangalore, India by moving some of our processing and operational work to Bangalore.

ANZ has had its own facility in Bangalore since 1989 and currently has about 1,800 of its staff there. The facilities are a regional hub for operations work across the ANZ Group, and the staffmembers are all ANZ employees.

Accessing our Bangalore facilities will benefit both our customers and ANZ National.

• For our customers, it will enable us to provide a better banking service in New Zealand, as it will increase our work window from about 8 hours (NZ workday) to around 16 hours (NZ workday + the Bangalore work day with Bangalore 6.5 hours behind New Zealand).

• For ANZ National, it will ensure we remain competitive in an increasingly globalised marketplace through our access to a large pool of high calibre staff. Our People We are proposing to move around 1% of our New Zealand work to ANZ Bangalore this calendar year, and up to 5% by the end of 2009.

Our goal is to redeploy ALL our people who may be affected by this initiative, and we are confident in achieving this goal because with normal staff turnover we employ around 800 new people in Wellington and Auckland each year. The staged shift of work over the next 18 months will also help staff, who wish to be re-deployed, find a suitable alternative role within the Bank.

As a result none of our staff need to lose their job.

Our priority at this point is to keep our people informed and we have held extensive staff briefing sessions this morning, although the initiative will not commence until later in the year.

We have also briefed and intend to work with Finsec to ensure that it is involved in this initiative and to minimise the impact on affected staff.

No customer-facing roles – including contact centres – will be included in this initiative.

ENDS

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