European financial services firms will
drastically increase their use of offshore resources, with up to 450,000
continental European financial services jobs moving offshore by 2010.
Europe is the fastest growing region for most Indian
outsourcing firms, and will continue to burgeon as European firms bring
their cost structures in line with global competitors, according to a new
Celent report, Offshoring in the European Banking and Securities
Industries. The report provides an overview and analysis of key
trends driving the move to offshore and looks at those European financial
services firms that are aggressively offshoring. Further, it looks at the
key issues that impact firms’ decisions about offshoring on a
country-by-country basis.
"As European financial markets continue to
liberalize, converge, and grow, banks that are not leveraging the cost
savings and experience of offshoring will find themselves unable to
compete with lower-priced firms that are. For the moment prices in markets
such as France and Germany are elevated enough that banks can make an
attractive margin even without offshoring; however, this situation is
unlikely to hold over time," says Lauren
Bender, manager of the Retail Securities & Investments
group at Celent and author of the report. "Over the next couple of
years we will see firms that have not yet started to offshore in an
important way continue to experiment with offshoring. Eventually most will
come to the point where offshoring has become a standard part of doing
business."
As the use of outsourcing and offshoring continues
to mature, Celent expects to see more and more firms developing a pool of
strategic partners and internal resources across the globe that will work
together to deliver a firm’s products and services in a way that
maximizes cost effectiveness and performance and minimizes overall risks.
This trend toward "global sourcing" goes hand-in-hand with the
move toward long-term strategic partnerships between financial services
firms and offshore/outsource vendors.
The report examines the experiences of leading
European firms such as ABN AMRO, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC, which have been
offshoring aggressively in recent years. It also explores why France,
Southern Europe, and the Nordic countries have been slower to offshore
than their British, Dutch, and German counterparts. In addition, the
report looks at the main offshore locations that are being leveraged by
European firms, namely India, Russia, China, and Eastern Europe.
The primary European countries covered in the report
are the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Benelux,
Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Scandinavia.
The primary offshore countries covered are India, China,
Russia, and Eastern Europe. Companies covered include ABN
AMRO, Barclays, CSFB, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, ING, Société
Générale, and UBS.
The 39-page report contains nine charts and three
tables. A table of
contents is available online.
