Aviva Australia (Aviva) is not expecting any fallout at a local level following more than 1000 redundancies from the firm’s United Kingdom parent operations.
“There won’t be any repercussions from the job losses in the UK,” Aviva general manager marketing and public relations Tim Cobb told InvestorDaily.
While redundancies are not planned at an Australian level, Aviva has implemented a run of freezes across the company.
Aviva has experienced a salary freeze since the beginning of this year and a recruitment freeze since midway through last year, Cobb said.
Instead of making redundancies, Aviva has begun moving staff from the investment and superannuation operations across to life insurance.
“At the moment our life business is growing very well, and while our platform business is quite tough at the moment, at least we’ve got the two lines. So we’re moving people from investment and super across to life insurance,” Cobb said.
The number of staff being transferred across the divisions is not large, with some cases of only one staff movement and other cases of 10 staff movements, he said.
“When having a headcount freeze for a while people are obviously realising that conditions are tough in financial services. I mean, not a week goes by without seeing one company or another laying off staff, and so staff understand,” Cobb said.
“Quite often, the fact that you’re moving staff from one area of the business to another gives people the opportunity to develop rather than seeing somebody come in from outside.”
Late last week Aviva’s parent company, Aviva Group in the UK, said it would reduce staff numbers by 1100 as a result of simplifying operations.
