EDMONTON, March 29, 2012 -- For the second time in four years, TD Bank is closing an Edmonton call centre.

The bank says it will close its TD Waterhouse investment centre, at Edmonton City Centre, in March 2013.

The centre handles calls related to TD Waterhouse clients’ direct investing accounts.

"Obviously, these decisions are not made lightly," Lynzey MacRae, TD’s manager of corporate communications, said Thursday from Calgary.

"We’re looking at streamlining our processes and we have capacity in other markets that we were needing to respond to, and so we were diverting calls to other places throughout Canada."

Most of the centre’s operations will be handled in Ontario.

The bank’s priority now is assisting its employees, she said.

"There are 130 employees that are impacted, however we do expect most of these employees to find positions elsewhere throughout the bank.

"Hopefully over the 12-month period, they’ll have time to find positions within different areas of the bank, and we’ll be definitely assisting them through that process."

The TD Waterhouse centre closure comes four years after the bank confirmed it was shuttering its TD Canada Trust call centre, also at the downtown mall, citing a shortage of workers in a hot economy. About 140 workers were affected by that decision.

"That was unrelated. It was a different line of business," MacRae said.

When that call centre came to Edmonton in 1997, such centres were considered a clean and novel industry promising diversification and hundreds of jobs to a fragile economy.

Posted by Veronica Silva Cusi, news correspondent
Source: http://www.edmontonjournal.com