FEATURE India vows quality to keep Wall Street business

indiaBPOking

There are savings but the 1-3 may be a bit too high, especially for financial services. It's much tougher than this article indicates to ship banking jobs abroad-- the laws are a tangle and you won't know them well unless you've been trained not only in the US, but in the particular state(s) and system where the bank operates, with all the local and legal peculiarities that obtain. There's a "hidden fee" for Indian companies in the form of legal consultation and handlers' fees, something that many of us have found out the hard way. Plus there's an increasing "security surcharge" for shipping out the data abroad, and I feel that some calculations like are a bit overhyped.

I'm not sure the language really has much to do with it-- if you speak the language, it doesn't do you diddly squat unless you've been trained in the particularities of a specific financial sector and a company's operations. Furthermore, much of India's latest improvement in the outsourcing service sector is coming in French, German and Japanese-language companies (which is why you see the big Indian BPO's frantically enrolling so many of their employees in language camps for these languages lately, or sending them abroad). My old company in fact had been angling for a contract to do dictation services for hospitals in Quebec-- 2 of the employees had spent years in Francophone Canada and another well over a decade in France.

Indian companies really need a broader diversity of employees who are trained in languages other than English such as French, Japanese, German and even others like Chinese and Spanish. There are some Indian call center companies for example that are requiring a significant fraction of their new hires to speak Spanish or Chinese, to service the large volume of American customers who use these languages. Language training in India's schools ought to branch out to offer a variety of languages to help increase the range of countries with which Indian firms can do business. As e.g. shown in this article:

Many other similar examples.

Sanjay