Bank of America sets up Indian outsourcing subsidiary

BANGALORE, INDIA -- Bank of America Corp. is setting up a wholly owned subsidiary in Hyderabad, India, that will process some of the bank's back-office operations.

The Continuum Solutions Pvt. Ltd. subsidiary will have about 500 staff by the end of this year, with up to 1,000 employees by mid-2005, said the bank, based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The subsidiary will help the bank remain competitive in the global market and help it to grow in the U.S. and abroad, said Rahul Samant, managing director of the bank's Global Delivery Center, and director of Continuum Solutions.

Bank of America is the latest multinational bank to outsource back-office operations to India. The bank already outsources software development work to Indian software companies such as Infosys Technologies Ltd. in Bangalore, and Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai.

U.S. banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies, mutual fund and other financial services firms are planning to relocate more than 500,000 jobs offshore, representing 8 percent of their workforces, over the next five years, according to a study conducted last year by the management consultancy A.T. Kearney Inc. in Plano, Texas.

Continuum Solutions is part of Bank of America's Global Delivery Center of Expertise, which is responsible for all of the bank's offshore outsourcing activities. The back-office support provided by Continuum will be a mix of transaction processing, as well as high-end complex processing.