Bendigo announces major I.T. expansion
Bendigo Bank will embark on a $2.5 million recruitment campaign to more than double its in-house systems development capacity.
Australia's only regionally-based bank seeks to attract 40 programmers and project managers to augment its current
26-person team working on software development projects. The new positions will be added over the next 18 months, with most housed at the bank's headquarters in Bendigo, central Victoria.
"This represents a major investment in skills and capacities to help take our business to the next level," managing director Rob Hunt said.
"Projects already underway include conversions of acquired businesses, the accelerated rollout of Community Bank, and our various joint venture activities.
"e-commerce is also growing rapidly and we are looking to develop a number of new solutions, including our investigation with MYOB of opportunities to deliver a range of financial services and efficiencies for the small to medium enterprise sector.
"There is no shortage of exciting projects to test the innovative skills of the people we seek."
Mr Hunt said that in approving the bank's biggest I.T. expansion in seven years, the board was mindful of the need to deliver development projects in a timely and cost-effective way.
"In 1994 we determined that in-house way the way to go and that decision has been more than vindicated in terms of cost, flexibility and development of skills and systems.
"But with our business consistently growing at around 20 per cent per annum and a large number of new projects in the pipeline, there is a clear need to ensure we are adequately resourced to deliver the outcomes our customers and business partners seek."
The bank's chief manager information technology, David Cooper, said advertisements would appear this weekend for a range of skills in mainframe programming, client/server and web development.
"We write programs in a range of languages including Cobol and Easytrieve for our mainframe and Visual Basic, C++ and Java in our client/server and web developments.
"There is exciting work in store. Our future front-end branch delivery programming will be written in Java, which will slash our cost of establishing new branches."
Mr Cooper said the new positions would include trainee programmers, programmers, analyst programmers, testers, change risk management and project managers.
"We aim to have the new team in place and operational in 18 months."
Mr Cooper said the bank would contribute to relocation expenses to staff moving from other locations to live in Bendigo.
Further details on job descriptions are available from Michael Kinsman on 03 5433 9776.
