Swiss banking giant UBS has opened a 1,200-seat support centre in Mumbai, the second in India, as it aims at doing 60% of its technology and operations work in-house, a move that could take work away from Indian IT companies.
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Switzerland's largest bank has always keen to invest in IT and BPO services. For example, UBS allocated more than $1 billion last year to standardise an IT platform across its wealth management business. But this trend by Asia's largest wealth manager, however, didn’t benefit the Indian IT sector, which has already seen sluggish growth in the past few years as clients wanted to save money and take work back in-house.
"We have centres in Poland, China, the US and in India. We are notionally targetting doing about 60% of work in-house and using vendors for the rest,” said Markus Lickert, global head of UBS Business Solution Centres. The company currently outsources about 70% of its technology and operations work.
The new centre in Mumbai, the second after a similar one in Pune, will provide several operational services including knowledge process, research and Analytics , as well as transaction and data processing, and IT infra support to businesses all over the world.
UBS has hired 300 employees to help the lender's technology function in its initial stages and will gradually increase the number, the bank said in a statement, without disclosing the cost of the investment in the facility.
“Business solutions centers are central to our ambition to offer competitive solutions to our clients while focusing on operational excellence,” said Axel Lehmann, group chief operating officer at UBS.
