We all know that offshore analysts are hugely efficient for budgets. Unhappily, local research and risk analysts tend to resist increasing their usage. Can we get past this with full buy-in from local stakeholders? The answer is yes and the key is quality.   Graduates in offshore locations are smart. In India, for example, 200,000 students take the entrance exams for 2,000 places at the best MBA colleges each year. So how come most offshore analysts are held in such low regard by your research colleagues? The answer is simply that mass market offshore analysts tend not to get much …

Costs need to come down in banking, so it’s inevitable that the CEO or COO will knock on the door of risk management and mandate offshoring or augmentation. What are the fundamental concepts you need? The concepts Outsourcing – using analysts employed by someone else. The legal form is consultancy and usually the consultants are dedicated to you. Offshoring – there are other centres, but much of the time, you’re dealing with analysts in India. They will mostly be early stage analysts, recruited in the first year of their careers. Nearshore – lower cost locations in your country. In the UK that might …

These days, when it comes to off-shoring thinking tasks, a lot of banks are feeling pretty jaded with wherever their off-shoring has been done. Usually that’s India. Off-shoring is quite often a draining experience – I’ve written in other blogs about why this so often happens (and why it doesn’t have to be that way). Missed deadlines, problems not being raised, ‘they just don’t get it’ – you know the litany.   One response to this situation is near-shoring. Birmingham and Salt Lake City are the sorts of places where banking activity will grow fast. A quite different response is to emphasis …

When introducing or upgrading an augmented research team, banks, asset managers and risk managers often hope that their home centre teams will automatically work out how to collaborate with these resources. In our experience of carrying out this integration since 2005, we have found that this is never in fact the case. Augmentation can happen offshore, in a city in your home country, or even with analysts who sit next to you.  The value addition of resources on offer to capital markets and risk management through augmentation has historically been at the low end. This is now changing. Imagine a …