Butterfield to make 18 redundant (2 in Cayman)
By Don Burgess, Deputy Editor BDA Sun
The bank notified six employees today (July 3) that they would be let go. All the positions are with the Operations and Investment Services departments.
The Bank of NT Butterfield & Son announced it will have 18 redundancies between now and August.
The bank notified six employees today (July 3) that they would be let go.
Michael Collier, senior executive vice president, said an additional 10 people in Bermuda and two people in Cayman will also be made redundant in August.
All the positions are with the Operations and Investment Services departments.
Employees who have been let go will continue to receive health insurance for the next six months. They also received a severance package.
Mr Collier said: “We’ve started today, a restructuring project, in operations and custody in both Bermuda and Cayman.”
He said the redundancies were necessary for three reasons.
“We have new technologies and we have the same banking system in Bermuda and also in Cayman. It has a lot more straight through processing which means there’s a lot less manual processing that our employees have to do.”
He said the second factor is that customers prefer to bank online, which means there is less manual processing done by employees and less work for them to do.
“The third factor is the most important and that’s the change in the Bermuda economy — it’s just smaller. GDP has obviously shrunk; the population has declined and our business volumes — whether it be deposits, loans, transactions, credit card transactions, merchant processing — all those volumes are directly correlated to the local economy and that has slowed down.”
The new head of custody for Bermuda and Cayman is Betsy Drummond. She will be based in Cayman.
Mr Collier said there will be four new senior roles — a head of Bermuda operations, a head of Cayman operations, a head of custody and productivity.
“Everyone both here and in Cayman will have an opportunity to interview for those roles. Once we choose those people, we will then go down the line and slot people in.”
Mr Collier said the new senior heads will all be hired from within Butterfield.
“We believe we have the skill set within the Bank to find the people from those areas that will do it.”
He added: “When we get to the end of the project in early August we’ll have a more efficient operating structure with a single manager running both Bermuda and Cayman.”
Donna Harvey Maybury, executive vice president, group head of human resources, added it was not easy to tell the employees that they were being made redundant and that there were more to come, the staff were appreciative that the Bank was being up front with them.
She said: “While the message wasn’t ideal, some of the feedback that we received was an appreciation that we are being transparent. That someone has come and talked them through this as opposed to sending a message that some redundancies took place.”
She said it wasn’t easy to make the staff redundant because they are family.
“We do look at the severance package; we do look at the benefits. We look at what we need to do at a difficult time for employees.
“There are tears from the people who leave us and there are tears from the people who remain.”
BDA Sun Editor’s note: In accordance with Media Council transparency rules, Don Burgess is a shareholder in the Bank of Butterfield.
PHOTOS: Butterfield Bank Bermuda/Butterfield Bank Cayman
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