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UK bank reviews Indian outsourcing center

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CIOL Bureau
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LONDON: UK bank Abbey is reviewing its outsourcing arrangements in India, where it has around 1,000 staff mainly dealing with administrative tasks and customer queries, a spokesman said on Wednesday.

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"We have no current plans to change our operations in India, either closing them or expanding them. As with all our third-party arrangements, there are reviews going on at the moment," the spokesman said, declining to say when the review of its Indian operations would be finished.

Britain's Daily Mail newspaper on Wednesday cited an Abbey insider as saying the bank planned to pull out of India next year and transfer the 1,000 jobs back to the UK because of customer complaints about service levels. The newspaper said a formal statement was expected later this year.

Spain's largest bank, Santander, bought Britain's second-largest mortgage lender last year and is reviewing all of Abbey's third-party contracts.

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Abbey's outsourcing partners in India are ITC Infotech and MsourcE, the call centre subsidiary of Mphasis. Abbey established a call centre in Bangalore two years ago.

A spokeswoman for Abbey's staff union said she would be delighted if the bank switched the Indian jobs back to the UK.

Santander said on Tuesday it expected to cut at least 4,000 jobs from Abbey by the end of the year and more redundancies after those.

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Analysts expect a total of 6,500 jobs could go, about a quarter of Abbey's workforce at the time of the takeover.

The Daily Mail said these job cuts would not be affected by the return of jobs from India.

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