TheJakartaPost
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Banks lay off employees due to automation, digitalization
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A customer withdraws money from an ATM. (Kontan/Daniel Prabowo)
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any state-owned and private lenders have slashed their workforce and halted the expansion of branch offices as they embark on a digital transformation.
To catch up with advancements in technology, the lenders are also recruiting employees that are able to perform digital roles.
“The reduction in the number of employees is part of BNI’s strategy to shift from offering human services to digital services,” Melly Meiliana, Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) corporate secretary, told The Jakarta Post recently.
Many affected staff have been reassigned to other positions, with BNI optimizing the role of existing employees by retraining them to perform higher value-added tasks. For example, bank tellers have been trained to become sales personnel, she said.
“The number of employees that BNI plans to redeploy to other positions gradually reached 60 percent of the bank’s total workforce,” she said, adding that the employees to be redeployed would be those whose current work involved repetitive and menial tasks, which could be replaced by technology.
In 2018, the number of BNI employees fell 2.4 percent to 27,224 from 27,803 in 2017, according to the bank’s financial report.
Other state-owned banks such as Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI), Bank Mandiri and Bank Tabungan Negara (BTN) have added to their workforce, but they acknowledged that the shift to a digital strategy had pushed them to look for employees who could perform digital or advisory roles.
