COMMENT
How comfortable are you with giving your personal details to call centre staff in foreign countries? Simon Moores doesn't like it one bit.
Something hasn't been quite right with the Barclays online banking site this week. As I write this column, I'll 'ping' it one more time to be sure - and the result is a 'no response from server' message, so all is not well in the wonderful world of online finance.
Being curious as to the cause and wanting to know if a client payment had made its way by Bacs into my business account, I decided to call the Barclays helpline. This was answered by a pleasant young woman with an Indian accent, who requested my online account information.
"Are you in Mumbai by any chance?" I asked.
"Yes," she answered.
"Do you know your website is only working intermittently, if at all?"
"I'll have to report it," she said. "But let me help you log on to your account."
"But I can't," I said. "The server is timing out."
Rather than continue, I said I would try Barclays in the UK, easier for both of us I thought, but then discovered the helpline number I had didn't offer any useful options.
So now, if I can publish this column fast enough, perhaps Barclays will notice there's a problem with their website. Is it a server issue I wonder or something more dramatic? A denial of service attack perhaps?
Regardless of what's causing the outage, the conversation with the woman in Mumbai raised another question in my mind - one echoed by a recent news story on how India is creating a new regulatory body, spearheaded by IT trade association Nasscom, to improve the level of security for the country's offshore IT services and business process outsourcing companies in the wake of incidents of call centre data theft.
Many - if not most - of our financial services businesses, even government departments, are, in the interests of greater profits, ruthlessly outsourcing their customer service centres and support desks to the cheapest locations on earth. India, with its high standards of education and command of the English language, is a natural choice for finance.
The Nasscom story illustrates a fundamental weakness in our search for cheaper outsourcing. We're sending the responsibility for safe-guarding data to countries where legislation and law-enforcement efforts to deter the risk of fraud and identity theft are not in any way comparable with the UK.
Would you feel comfortable with storing your personal and financial information - and having it routinely accessed - in countries outside Europe? I certainly don't. I have little enough confidence in our own Home Office, let alone some other government.
So when the woman in Mumbai asked me for my account information, I was reluctant to part with any details - simply based on my experience of global internet crime.
I'm sure she's locked in a soundproof cubicle in a steel vaulted data centre with proper physical security but that doesn't make me feel any better - knowing that the real-life counterparts of Tom Cruise and the Mission Impossible team are out there looking to discover how much money I don't have in my Barclays online current account.
Comments
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1. anonymous
A familiar story...when one cannot beat India with anything substantial, use poor data protection laws, the weapon of last resort! Well, India may not have the kind of data protection laws that the European countries claim to have, Indian companies have come up with some of the most stringent measures in the world to protect sensitive data. And not that data theft is rampant in India, a few isolated incidents, miniscule in comparison to the size of the industry - US$ 6.3 billion in the current fiscal. And despite stringent data protection laws, the West reports more cyber crimes than India can ever hope to achieve! Comon chaps...grow up and think of other sticks to beat India with. This issue has been flogged enough...
2. Ted Tann-Watson
I have to say that my experience of offshore call centres has not been good. I have spent considerable amounts of time trying to get the BT Broadband call centre to understand that the real problem I had was that the Voyager 210 router they supplied just wasn't up tot he job - but then how would they understand that, when they couldn't even get my name right!
As well as the problem with security highlighted here, I see two other problems - first of all, every time we export a call centre to another country, we are losing a little bit more skill. Surely we have learned something from the mistakes of the last thirty years, and the destruction of our manufacturing capacity as we have exported that? Secondly, I talk to more and more people who refuse to deal with an offshore call centre - which ultimately means that businesses will lose out, as their customers turn elsewhere.
But then, we could all become service level managers...
3. Jagannath
I think the opinion is not comprehensive about the problem. It looks like he has already decided that Outsourcing is bad and then formulating his arguments to suppor that.
I accept that there are loopholes in the outsourcing sector , but there are efforts to plug it. Also there will be new loopholes continously arising. Does it mean that in UK there are no irregularities??
The arguments by Mr.Moores should have been better and comprehensive instead he is talking about MI2 situation which itself happens in the West(inthe film)