Prometheus 6   

It's not workers that are competing, it's cost of living that's competing

As It Tries to Cut Costs, Wall Street Looks to India
By SARITHA RAI

BANGALORE, India, Oct. 7 - Global companies have long taken advantage of India's large college-educated, low-cost work force. Now Wall Street firms, including J. P. Morgan, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley, are joining the chase for more highly skilled Indian labor.

J. P. Morgan, the investment banking arm of J. P. Morgan Chase, plans to hire a few dozen researchers in Bombay by the end of the year. Morgan Stanley, which already has investment banking and mutual fund operations in India, will employ a similar number of researchers this year, also in Bombay. Both teams will consist of junior-level analysts collecting data, analyzing balance sheets and working on basic financial models.

This shifting of more sophisticated work to India comes on the heels of a rush of call center and other back-office nonmanufacturing jobs here, and is seen by many experts as yet another phase in the latest drift of jobs to low-cost countries that began in the early 1990's with Silicon Valley companies.

Some Wall Street firms are just observing the research trend for now, though they already have a presence here. Merrill Lynch has an investment banking, brokerage and asset management joint venture in India as well as a technology development center to build proprietary software for its global operations.

And Goldman Sachs plans to establish an Indian unit with 250 employees working on operations and technology. But neither firm has moved any financial research to the country.

Other skeptical firms are, however, being drawn in. Among them is Lehman, "though we are not big fans of business process outsourcing," said Peter Nag, vice president and global program management officer for Lehman in New York. Lehman has cautiously started a few pilot programs in Bombay for research-related tasks like data cleansing and creating presentations. The programs, which began a couple of months ago, are run by boutique Indian firms set up by former Wall Street employees.

Other financial giants, like Citigroup, are expanding the Indian side of their corporate and investment banking activities. Citigroup executives did not respond to requests for comment on research being shifted to India. But the company's Web site says: "Citigroup's global corporate and investment bank has expanded in India rapidly over the last two years. Currently, the firm has more than 40 staff based in Mumbai working in investment banking, equities, and equity research departments." Mumbai is the local name for Bombay.

There are two main forces behind the experimentation with research operations in India, experts say. Wall Street revenues are well below where they were when the market peaked, so cost-cutting is imperative. And the investment advice scandal involving 10 big securities firms that was resolved with a $1.4 billion settlement this spring has resulted in a heightened awareness of the need for fair and untainted research.

"The downturn in the capital markets has collided with cutthroat competition among Wall Street firms to create pressure on costs," said Christopher Gentle, the research director at Deloitte Consulting in London.

Such pressure is being felt across a broad spectrum of industries in the United States, and the farming out of all kinds of work once done only or largely domestically has been increasing rapidly.

The total outsourcing of business-process jobs by American companies is expected to grow to $136 billion by 2015, from $4 billion in 2000, and create 3.3 million jobs, according to Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass. An estimated one million of these jobs will move abroad - a trend that dismays some American workers.

China, India, the Philippines and Russia are expected to gain most of the work. And many people expect India to snare much of the highly prized jobs, like the kind Wall Street is starting to export.