The Hindu Business Line : HSBC plans to bring 200-300 jobs to Hyderabad centre

HSBC Bank, London has plans to hire 200-300 people at its Hyderabad back office facility as part of its strategy to cut costs of the UK operations, the bank's spokesperson in London today told Business Line.

This is part of the British bank's effort to move out jobs from the UK and reorganise its support and processing facilities elsewhere over the next two years.

On Thursday, HSBC Bank plc, the UK arm of the HSBC group announced 3,500 job cuts principally in the UK head office. Along with the recruitment of 1,000 new front-office branch service staff the bank has plans to transport 550 jobs to its call centres and processing centres in Asia in India, China, Malaysia and the Philippines.

Mr Richard Lindsay, spokesperson for HSBC UK when contacted told Business Line, "There will be 550 jobs that will be moving outside of the UK. Out of which about 200-300 jobs should be coming to our BPO in Hyderabad. The numbers are yet to be finalised. The job creation will be done over a two-year period."

"The functionalities will include processing and transaction handling for loans, etc for the bank's customers mostly in the UK. There will be some processing work for European operations too," he said.

The remaining 250-350 jobs will go to the rest of the processing centres in China, Malaysia and the Philippines.

With the reorganisation exercise HSBC Bank intends to make a saving of £90 million in 2006 when the entire exercise is to be completed. According to a press release from the bank which was issued in London, "Costs in the UK, including the costs of complying with new regulations, are rising almost as fast as revenues - between 2001-2003 income grew by 9.8 per cent, while costs rose by 8.4 per cent."

The bank is confident that it will be able to carry out the job cuts in the UK although Unifi, the finance and banking staff union, has threatened to go on strike.

HSBC recently reported record profits of £7.8 billion for last year, and said it wanted to streamline its costs, improve productivity and cut bureaucracy.

HSBC Electronic Data Processing (India) Pvt Ltd, the local BPO arm of HSBC group, has big plans in India and expects to start a processing centre in Visakhapatnam by June 2004 in addition to its facilities in Bangalore and Hyderabad. The set up in the pipeline is reportedly to cater to credit card and mortgage back office processes.

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