UK
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.
Outsourcing must not be an India-specific issue for US
Outsourcing of jobs to India is likely to become an issue in the coming US Presidential elections, though Indian industrialists have impressed upon US officials and Senators that a trend for reverse outsourcing by Indian companies has begun and that the issue should not become India specific, said Sunil Bharti Mittal, President, Confederation of Indian Industry.
Mittal has just returned from the US after heading a business delegation that explored several key issues between the two countries.
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"There has been a trend of reverse outsourcing recently. IBM has bagged $1.1 billion order from Bharti Enterprises. Other telecom companies are also looking at outsourcing to the US," Mittal said while addressing a press conference in the Capital on Saturday.
"We also tried to explain that India could do very little about US companies coming to India and setting up huge facilities," said Mittal, adding that at the same time Indian companies are increasingly investing in the US, resulting in job creation there.
Anonymous 04 Oct 2007
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