Bank Jobs Head to Texas
Washington Mutual Inc. on Wednesday told 1,000 employees who work at a call center in Chatsworth that it would move their jobs to Texas and Costa Rica to cut costs.
The positions will be phased out starting in two months, with some employees offered work at a new Washington Mutual center in San Antonio -- where most of the jobs are being moved -- and others given job-search assistance, the Seattle-based thrift said.
Spokesman Gary Kishner said he couldn’t provide numbers on how many workers would be given the option to move.
An additional 2,000 Washington Mutual employees will remain in Chatsworth at an office complex that once housed the headquarters of Great Western Financial Corp., which Washington Mutual acquired in 1997.
The shift is part of a larger effort to make back-office and support operations more efficient as the nation’s largest thrift pursues ambitious expansion plans, said Chairman and Chief Executive Kerry Killinger.
The realignment will involve moving several thousand jobs to foreign countries, as most of Washington Mutual’s competitors in the financial services industry are doing, Killinger said.
The thrift has 1,600 contract workers in Costa Rica, India, Canada and the Philippines.
“We expect that to grow to more than 6,000 over the next two years,” Killinger said. “And we expect our new low-cost center in San Antonio to grow to 3,000” during that time.
A recent study by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu that looked at moving jobs offshore found that large financial services companies were capturing less than one-third of the potential cost savings offered by moving operations to other countries.
The jobs remaining in Chatsworth, where Washington Mutual leases more than 1 million square feet of office space, are for the most part higher-paying than those that will be moved, Kishner said. He said those staying included human resources, finance, legal, marketing, purchasing and loan servicing employees.
Also Wednesday, Washington Mutual announced fourth-quarter earnings of $865 million, or 85 cents a share, up from $668 million, or 76 cents, in the fourth quarter of 2004.
Expanding business in branches and the acquisition of credit-card company Providian Financial helped offset lower results from the slowing and hotly competitive mortgage business, Killinger said.
Wall Street had been expecting earnings of 90 cents a share, according to a Thompson Financial survey, and at least one analyst downgraded the company’s stock based on the earnings report.
Richard X. Bove, who follows Washington Mutual for Punk, Ziegel & Co., said in a research note that he cut his rating to “market perform” because the company’s fundamentals were weakening as its stock was trading near a 12-month high.
The earnings were announced after the close of trading Wednesday. Washington Mutual shares, which had fallen by 17 cents to $44.41 on the day, dropped to $43.50 in after-hours trading.
