Other countries, other measures: at the beginning of the corona-crisis, managers at global banks had to juggle with measures implemented by numerous governments – countries that are locations for outsourcing such as India and Eastern Europe sometimes had tougher measures than those implemented in Switzerland. This had an impact on the business, according to Ingo Rauser, partner at Capco consultants.
«International banks made the experience that units that had been outsourced abroad at times were restricted in their operability and in an emergency mode. In Switzerland, project teams were diverted to do tasks in managing procedures,» said the adviser.
UBS country chief and operations expert Harald Egger told magazin «Bilan» that the move into homeoffice had worked perfectly in India. The company had even hired more staff. But the crisis will prompt a rethink of the outsourcing strategy at banks. Several big banks have taken the first steps by relying more on their own people in low-cost countries instead of people at third-party providers.
Or, some banks may simply stay at home. UBS introduced a new booking platform in recent years and opened new service centers in Switzerland (see picture below). The outsourcing 2.0 may yet be accelerated in future. The number of back-office jobs in any case will decline as more and more procedures are made digital and readily available in the cloud.
UBS-Service Center in Biel, Switzerland
As such, the attraction of moving jobs to places far away would be lost. In a post-corona-world, where globalization is being unravelled, outsourcing looks like a concept of another world.
3. The Return of Banking Secrecy
