Into India
25 June 2007
Anonymous
Thought your job was immune to offshoring? Think again.
The latest report from consultancy firm Deloitte says the number of financial services jobs offshored has risen 1800% over the past four years, with the average number of staff toiling in distant places rising from 150 to 2,700.
It also reinforces the nasty notion that it's not just IT programmers and call centre types who are being shifted to the likes of Mumbai. 'Knowledge processing' (aka research and analysis) jobs are the latest to migrate, according to Chris Gentle, associate partner in financial services at Deloitte: "One major international bank has recently put its head of research into India," he says ominously.
The tortuous task of assembling M&A pitch books is also on the offshoring agenda. Earlier this month, it emerged that Merrill Lynch had invested US$11m in India's Copal Partners, a provider of outsourced research and analytics (pitch book) services, following the lead of Deutsche Bank and Citigroup. Corporate finance analysts' delight at being delivered of the gruelling grunt work may yet turn to despair at being done of out of their jobs.
Predictably, most offshored jobs head to India, where labour is cheap, people are plentiful and derivatives processing is all the rage. However, Gentle says China is rising on the offshoring stakes, as are the Philippines (Deutsche) and Singapore.
Closer to home, jobs are also being shifted to Manchester, Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Budapest and Prague (it emerged today that UBS, for example, intends to create two new centres for admin and 'other' staff in India and Poland). Equity researchers may yet find themselves traversing the Danube rather than the Thames en route to the office.
UK








Eventually domestic demand will create bottlenecks in both China and India, after all intelligence and energy follows the same bell curve as in the west so have no fear if you are 2 sigma above the norm.
Kare Jonsson 26 Jun 2007
RECOMMEND Recommended 0 times | Alert Moderator