A passage to India

Regulatory scrutiny and cost concerns have prompted many global investment banks to cut investment in credit research. One option to make up the shortfall is to outsource the number-crunching to cheaper centres such as India. But is it a good idea? Nadia Damouni finds out

Outsourcing back-office processes or call centres to cheap locations such as India is nothing new. But as pressure on banks to cut costs in credit research continues to rise, this once pivotal part of a bank's fixed-income service to clients is increasingly being transferred out of the major financial centres.

Quantitative analytics is the area most likely to be moved overseas, and in particular to India, which churns out a well-trained supply of skilled analysts from its universities, such as