Almost 2,000 Lloyds IT jobs to go as data centre services move offshore

Project Aurora will see data centre operations roles moved to IBM, then offshore

Almost 2,000 IT workers at Lloyds Banking Group are to have their roles transferred to IBM and then offshored.

That's according to Lloyds Trade Union (LTU), which cited a recent presentation by CIO Morteza Mahjour in which he revealed some of the details of a seven-year £1.3bn deal with IBM called Project Aurora which will see 1,961 IT staff outsourced to IBM then ultimately replaced by offshore workers within four years. The internal union, which is not officially recognised by Lloyds and took no part in the negotiations, believes the deal will be publicly announced within a few days.

Negotiations over IT roles have been taking place between Lloyds, IBM and the Unite and Accord unions, which the LTU understands have agreed to the outsourcing arrangement.

The majority of the jobs affected will be from data centres in Copley, Yorkshire and Edinburgh, as the Windows, Unix, Linux and IBM I-Series platforms are outsourced to IBM along with 2,000 of the 3,200 applications currently used by Lloyds Banking Group, including "critical systems which underpin the bank's major payment, treasury trading, settlement and digital services," the union said.

"1,961 staff will be transferred to IBM including permanent staff, contractors, third parties and offshore suppliers," said LTU in its member newsletter. "However after four years, only 193 of the staff transferred to IBM will be still be working on the LBG contract."

The bulk of the work being done by IBM will be carried out by 993 staff based offshore, it continued.

The announcement of Project Aurora has been delayed, according to the union, because of complaints from senior managers and IT staff within the bank citing security fears over migration core services to a third party operating overseas.

Last summer Lloyds announced the loss of 640 IT jobs as part of a round of restructuring that will see 9,000 jobs cut in total and 200 branches closed. In January the bank was hit by a DDoS attack which made its website temporarily unavailable, and online customers unable to access their accounts.