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RESEARCH has revealed that 28 firms have outsourced more than 50,000 jobs serving UK customers to India over the past two years.
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More and more firms are planning to 'remote source' call centre work to India, making savings of around 40%.
Recent announcements have included plans by the national rail enquiry service to move 600 jobs to India as part of cost cutting measures, while HSBC intends to outsource 4,000 jobs over two years.
Offshore outsourcing of call centre work is expected to grow by 25% over the next five years.
Financial services companies including Abbey, Barclays and HSBC have led the way in remote sourcing, closely followed by firms in other sectors including British Airways, BT and Tesco.
Unions have argued that turnover rates in some Indian call centres have reached 60%, twice as much as in the UK.
The Communication Workers Union said BT and other companies that outsourced call centre work should be reminded of the benefits of remaining in the UK.
'Outsourcing will destroy UK jobs, damaging both the UK economy and company reputations in the process,' said an official.
A report compiled by the CWU showed the following financial services companies outsourcing jobs serving UK customers to India:
ABBEY NATIONAL established an IT development presence in Bangalore in September 2002, employing 100 skilled IT staff. This provides software development, maintenance, testing and support services.
ABN AMRO CENTRAL ENTERPRISE SERVICES (ACES) has call centres in Gurgaon and Delhi with more than 2,000 employees. It handles credit risk management and authorisation of payments.
AMERICAN EXPRESS first outsourced work to India in 1994. It now has 4,000 employees there, handling financial accounting, data management, information analysis and control, administration, recruiting and staffing and payroll services.
AVIVA announced plans today to outsource 2,350 jobs to India, where it already employs 1,200 workers.
AXA INSURANCE has moved 100 back office jobs to Bangalore.
BARCLAYS cut around 150 UK jobs at its business banking and credit card businesses to start using cheaper Indian labour in June.
CITIBANK employs 3,000 people in Bombay and Chennai. They handle wholesale banking, retail banking products, billing services, customer care, transaction processing, payroll services and accounting.
DEUTSCHE NETWORK SERVICES PVT LTD, a division of Deutsche Bank, employs 50 people in Bangalore to work on payment and cash management processing.
FIDELITY INVESTMENTS set up its business process outsourcing centre in Gurgaon, near Delhi in July. The centre serves as the hub for all of Fidelity Investments' international businesses and employs 200-250 people, which will gradually increase to around 1,000.
GOLDMAN SACHS announced in July that it is set to create 250 administrative and IT jobs in India.
HSBC first outsourced to India in 2000, and now has more than 2,000 employees in Bangalore and Hyderabad who deal with accounting transactions and transaction processing. In October it announced plans to outsource 4,000 jobs from the UK to India, Malaysia and China within the next two and a half years.
MORGAN STANLEY employs around 1,600 staff in Bombay who provide transaction support for operations in the UK, Europe and Australia.
PRUDENTIAL hopes to have a call centre in Bombay by the end of 2004, employing 850 people.
STANDARD CHARTERED BANK first outsourced to India in 2002 and now has 4,500 employees there, dealing with trade services, payments and messaging services, credit operations to account services, data administration and credit card services.
JP MORGAN CHASE first outsourced to India in 2001 and now has 3,000 employees there who deal with transaction processing services.
CAPITAL ONE first outsourced work to India in 2002 and now has 1,200 employees there who deal with customer services, risk operations, production services.
LLOYDS TSB announced plans in October to close its call centre in Newcastle and outsource the 986 UK jobs to its centre in Hyderabad.
Companies from other sectors outsourcing to India:
ACCENTURE first outsourced work to India in 2001. It currently has 1,000 employees in Bombay and aims to more than double its Indian software and back office staff to 2,500 within two years.
AOL ONLINE MEMBER SERVICES INDIA in Bangalore has 1,500 staff. The centre, a wholly in-bound server centre, provides customer acquisition and support services out of Bangalore for AOL members globally and handled 10 million member calls in the year up to June.
BRITISH AIRWAYS has 2,400 employees in Bombay who manage passenger accounting, error handling and frequent flier miles tracking for BA and other airlines. BT plans to create 2,200 jobs in India by 2004 but has indicated to the CWU that more than 7,000 positions could eventually be moved.
DELL INTERNATIONAL SERVICES has about 3,800 employees in Bangalore and Hyderabad, supporting PC customers worldwide.
D-LINK has commissioned a sophisticated global tech support centre in Bombay to provide voice-based technical support for its products to English speaking D-Link overseas business units worldwide. The centre has a capacity of 100 seats and is presently manned by a team of 50 engineers.
GE has 11,000 employees in Bangalore, Gurgaon and Hyderabad who provide network support and risk management to more than 30 GE businesses globally.
IDEAL SHOPPING CHANNEL is relocating its order-taking operation to India.
NATIONAL RAIL ENQUIRIES announced in October plans to move 600 call centre jobs to India.
TESCO is to transfer 350 jobs to a call centre in India.
VERTEX, the customer services arm of United Utilities, announced in July that is had signed a new deal with Powergen and will use part of its call centre operations in India to service the contract.
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