Would you seriously consider moving from banking to insurance? (If you've been retrenched in operations, your answer should probably be yes)

In what could be the start of a subtle shift for back-office careers, candidates from the banking sector are becoming more open to working in insurance.

This has largely been triggered by the recent round of redundancies affecting operations staff at banks such as ANZ, NAB and Westpac. Although the insurance industry certainly isn’t immune from its own job cuts and offshoring (think Suncorp and IAG), it is still managing to provide alternative employment options for retrenched bank staff.

“I wouldn’t yet describe this as a major trend, but it is happening. A significant amount of retail- and investment-banking operations jobs have been shed and not all these people can be re-employed within banking,” says Andrew Hanson, director, financial services, Robert Walters.

He stresses that banking candidates are not pro-actively clamouring to get into insurance. “When they meet recruiters, they don’t mention it at first, but they quickly become open to it when we tell them where the opportunities are. It’s a supply and demand situation.”

Junior client-services, claims and underwriting roles are the most welcoming to ex-bank employees, he adds. “Ops people have some transferable skills and can be trained on the basics of their new job. They have a reasonable success rate in going over to insurance.”

Because most insurance positions involve dealing with fairly vanilla products, junior operations professionals from retail banks are usually better equipped for moving sectors than their i-banking counterparts, who are used to working on specialist transactions. “And compensation in retail banking is likely to be similar to insurance, while those from investment banking would take a hit on the pay front,” says Hanson.

Swapping sectors is more difficult at a senior level because a high level of insurance knowledge and experience is typically required. “I haven’t seen as many people move across in senior roles such as claims/underwriting because these are fairly specialised. If firms can get people with insurance understanding, they will.”

The exception to this is an internal move to a bank's insurance arm, particularly if the firm is downsizing a division, but wants to retain key senior staff. One recruiter, who asked not to be named, gives the example of CBA transferring people to CommInsure so as not to lose their management experience.

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