THE Newcastle Permanent has shed 16 staff, attributing the job cuts to being part of its "evolution" and vision to provide the nation's "favourite" banking experience.
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The redundancies come as Bernadette Inglis began on Monday as the first female chief executive officer in the 116-year history of the Hunter headquartered, customer-owned banking organisation.
Felicity Laczina, the organisation's Chief People Officer, said the job cuts in its Newcastle headquarters were effective by the end of June and part of the Perm's strategic planning process that had taken place in recent months.
"We have identified and implemented some changes which have affected the scope of some existing roles, the creation of new roles and teams, and the removal of some roles that are no longer required to deliver our services," she said.
One of the "key initiatives" to come from the Perm's strategic planning was the creation of a division "dedicated to strategy and transformation" to implement change required to achieve its vision.
Ms Laczina said the new division had also identified "opportunities" to streamline the delivery of services within the Perm's loans administration, IT operations, mortgage lending and branch administration teams, which had resulted in the job cuts.
She said the wellbeing of staff remained a priority as the Newcastle Permanent continued on its "journey of transformation".
"We are committed to supporting our people and where possible, we have redeployed staff, however in some cases there have not been any suitable roles, or people have chosen to pursue other opportunities outside of Newcastle Permanent," she said.
Questioned as to whether more redundancies were scheduled, Ms Laczina said there was "not a process" of identifying a number of redundancies within a certain time frame: "It is an ongoing evolution of the way our organisation delivers services to our company."
Formerly at Westpac, Ms Inglis said the Newcastle Permanent had "a great opportunity to show we are different" in the wake of the banking royal commission.
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