Lehman plans outsourcing hub in Mumbai

Lehman Brothers, the US financial services major, is coming in a big way into India with plans to set up a large captive outsourcing centre in Mumbai which will be engaging staff in the hundreds, according to industry sources.

The centre will be an enterprise wide operation handling both BPO and software development work. As far as BPO work is concerned, it is a sort of returning to India by Lehman as it had earlier ended its voice business engagement with Wipro Spectramind.

At that time Charlie Cortese, MD for information technology, Lehman Brothers Holdings, had said the company was not ending or pulling back on outsourcing and asserted that "overall numbers involved in outsourcing will go up next year."

That is going to happen now, not through a third party but its own centre. The Mumbai centre will be handling high end work like mortgage origination, equity research and software product development. It will not handle voice business which had migrated back.

Cortese had earlier indicted that only a fraction of the 450 people engaged in work outsourced to Indian would be affected by decision to wind up the help desk.

This would indicate that the company's engagement with Wipro and TCS for tasks like software maintenance and quality assurance will continue.

The Mumbai centre, according to sources, is being set up by Sujit Baksi, newly appointed senior vice president and chief administrative officer who has moved in from vCustomer where he was heading global operations.

Industry sources pointed out that this decision by Lehman Brothers consolidates the trend of increasing offshoring through captive operations, particularly in financial services.