Virgin Money jobs at risk


29 September 2005 12:20

Scores of staff could lose their jobs at Virgin Money as the company is now planning on outsourcing jobs elsewhere in the UK.

Bosses at the Richard Branson-owned company have revealed the company intends to restructure.

The Whiting Road-based company said it planned to outsource all its back-office administration work and other jobs were being reviewed to meet a new organisational structure.

Bosses said they could not rule our redundancies. They refused to speculate how many job losses there might be at the company which currently employs 350 staff.

Gordon Maw, communications director, said they had just started the legal process to consult with staff.

"At the moment there's nothing definite to confirm, all that's happened is we are considering a process to review the way that we're structured," he said.

"No-one at the moment has been confirmed redundant everyone is going through a process. We've spoken to all staff about a restructuring that's coming up — we're trying to give people quite a lot of notice about it."

Mr Maw said affected staff might not be made redundant and could be offered opportunities to relocate to the companies they outsourced to or to retrain.

The work will be outsourced to companies in the UK.

He said the 10-year-old company's current organisational structure was out-of-date and the launch of a new range of general insurance products and the sale of its life business meant it needed a new business model.

"We've had an unprecedented period of success in the company but what we need to do is review the structure of the company to take the company forward. We need an administrative system that can allow us to develop new products.

"Outsourcing the whole of the administration area reflects that we're not going to be able to support that function in future because the system we have now won't be able to sustain the rapid growth we have in mind.

"We also need to make sure that everyone here is in the right role for the partnership model that we have now and that we don't have people doing jobs they did back to how we did things three to four years ago. Their jobs are being tweaked to reflect that."

Virgin Money, which provides insurance, loans and credit cards, already outsources some back-office work. Staff at MBNA do the back-office administrative work for the Virgin credit card.

The company, which is part of the Virgin Group, was founded in the city a decade ago with 40 staff and now has offices in Sydney.

It saw pre-tax profits climb to £10.1m in 2004.

The total number of jobs that have been lost to Norwich through offshoring to date is 4,150.

Norwich Union has already offshored 4,000 jobs to India.

Last year it made 1,400 redundancies in the UK with 110 of these in Norwich.

By the end of 2005 Marsh expects to have about 150 staff in its offshore operating centre at Pune in India and 60 jobs in Norwich are being lost as part of that re-organisation.

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