State Street is the latest global bank to cut back its workforce, by 1600-1800 people worldwide, with the small local redundancy list including the managing director of State Street Australia.
With Australia suffering only about 10 redundancies in the 6 per cent global cull announced last week, State Street has decided to split the region into ‘North Asia’ and ‘South Asia’, and for Peter Baker, a former Australian head, to return from Singapore in January to run the southern Asian region from Sydney.
This has meant that David Travers, the former managing director of State Street Australia, and head of the securities services arm of the three Australian businesses, has left the company last week.
A State Street spokesperson said that about two-thirds of the overall redundancies would be in North America, and the remaining one-third in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
"The impact on Australia would be very small," she said.
However, the revised business view of the region involves splitting the northern part of Asia, which tends to be dominated by pension funds as clients, from the southern part, which tends to be dominated by funds managers.
Baker, a New Zealander who worked at the former Chase Manhattan Bank in Sydney, is a former head of the Australian securities services business for State Street, who also headed up operations in London before recently relocating to Singapore. He takes up his new position next month.
Travers joined State Street, also from the former Chase Manhattan, in September 2000, initially as operations director for client relations in Australia and New Zealand. He was previously with the former Morgan Stanley custody business in Australia, which was acquired by Chase in the late 1990s. He is a former chair of the Australian Custodial Services Association, who oversaw its reorganisation and the outsourcing of its secretariat after the founding secretary, John Gall, retired. He also pioneered a directorship for a custodian/administrator on the board of the Alternative Investment Management Association (Australia chapter).
It is understood that most, perhaps all, of the Australian redundancies are from securities services, which is the largest of the three State Street businesses in Australia. The other two businesses are State Street Trust & Bank, which runs currencies and related services, and State Street Global Advisors, which is the funds management arm.
