At the annual Indian IT industry conference, NASSCOM, held in Mumbai in early February, the buzz was around business process outsourcing (BPO), the new star on the horizon. HSBC CEO Stephen Green said, in his keynote address, that India has a “compelling competitive advantage” in business process outsourcing because it has the second-highest number of English-speaking graduates in the world, with 24 million university-educated persons.
HSBC was “delighted to capitalise” on these strengths, he added. Of the 12,500 employees the bank has here in India, two-thirds work at its global processing or software development centres and the bank is moving a part of its financial research work to India.
