Commonwealth Bank is poised to relocate about 40 roles in its business banking area to India. News of the latest job migration program at the bank was announced by the Finance Sector Union in a statement sent to media on Wednesday morning. “All the Australian jobs to be lost are in Sydney,” the union said. “The positions lost include 39 operations team members, three operations managers, one business strategy senior manager and one service manager.” A spokesperson for the union said it was concerned that some of the team member roles earmarked for export included customer contact roles. A CBA spokesperson said they did not include call centre or any customer service positions. The bank spokesperson did not comment on the details of the FSU release in an official statement issued on behalf of the bank but said the bank had been expanding its Australian workforce since it resumed moving roles to its Indian subsidiary in 2021. “CBA employs around 52,000 people across Australia, New Zealand and its international operations, including our wholly-owned business in India,” the CBA spokesperson said. “Around 80 per cent of the group’s total employees are based here in Australia.  “Since 2021 the CBA Group has recruited more than 10,000 people of whom the majority are Australian-based. “CBA India was established to help deliver our strategy of building tomorrow’s bank today for our customers.” FSU national secretary Julia Angrisano said the offshoring decision was likely to upset Bankwest business customers who were recently migrated to CBA. “The Commonwealth Bank has recently transitioned all of Bankwest’s business banking customers over to the CBA,” she said. “Now the service they receive from their bank will be from half a world away.  “Bankwest customers who had a reasonable expectation that they would be looked after by experienced CBA staff in Australia have every right to feel betrayed. “The decades of institutional knowledge lost with these Australian job losses is of course of no concern to the CBA fat cats who make these decisions.”   While CBA resumed a long term program to relocate technology, compliance and risk management jobs to its Bangalore facility in 2021, if the union’s concerns are right that the offshoring program includes customer contact roles it would mark a shift in the offshoring policy which rules out sending call centre roles overseas. In 2017, the bank pledged to keep its call centres in Australia because CBA-sponsored research showed that nine out of 10 Australians loved the idea of the country’s largest bank employing local workers. The research made an impression on Sian Lewis, the group head of human resources, who at the time publicly renewed the bank’s commitment to retaining call centre jobs in Australia. “Australians may be surprised to learn that our customer call centres have always been local,” Lewis said in November 2017. “Our customers have told us for some time that they like dealing with people who live and work locally, in the same communities as they do, and nine out of 10 Australians agree because of the jobs and opportunities this creates.” Lewis went on to say that the bank wanted “our