Barclays banks on offshore

Barclays is increasingly confident in its use of business process outsourcing (BPO) which it says has improved time to market and is now looking to increase the complexity of the services it offshores.

Charles Stiller, global servicing new initiatives director at the bank, said its confidence has grown since its first serious foray in 2004 and that it now relies on about eight operational sites in India.

Stiller said Barclays was considering setting up new sites both in India and elsewhere and wants to increase the value and complexity of processes it offshores.

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Speaking at the FT Global Outsourcing and Offshoring Conference, Stiller said: "As Barclays grows globally we require additional capacity to service our clients at scale even for small volume markets.

"This capacity, together with the advantage of low-cost locations, supports the establishment and growth of global operating sites. Operationally it has provided us with great speed to make greater to market and added greater capacity to staff."

He added: "The number of BPO processes has increased as the Barclays management became increasingly comfortable with the success with which we could achieve offshore."

Stiller said it protects itself against disaster or outage at sites handling its IT outsourcing and BPO by generally running two sites in each place – with each able to take over the others functions - in Dehli, Mumbai, Pune and Chennai.

These sites process a range of services including lending and account processing.