I've been ruminating on the suggestion by Professor Alan Blinder (poor fellow: A. Blinder - no wonder he never got the top job at the Federal Reserve) that millions of high-skilled US and UK jobs might be effectively outsourced to cheaper staff in India and China. He has focused on accountants, computer programmers and lawyers, but why not bankers too?
Certainly our Back Office could all be sent to Bangalore, as could most of the Middle Office. Those various consultants that have been inflicted on us over the last few years always long to consolidate the equity and fund research teams that are currently scattered across the world. Why not replace them altogether with a cadre of Chinese brains accessible via broadband?
But then we come to the core of the business. Could my job be done by a bright young Indian graduate based out of Mumbai? On the face of it, that seems a ridiculous proposition. This is a trust business, we all cry. Clients demand long term relationships with their private bankers. They want to be able to drop in at any moment and chat about their portfolio over a superior glass of claret. Doesn't that protect us, at least, from the Blinder effect?
I wonder. Quite a few of my clients now communicate with me almost exclusively by email and telephone. That's how they like it. I may go and visit them once a year to reinforce the relationship, but that could just as well be done as part of a grand annual tour by that young Mumbai fellow. Not great for his carbon footprint, but probably much cheaper than keeping me on.
I'm not too worried about my own job. This isn't the fastest-evolving sector of the banking industry, and I only need a few more years. But it might be another reason to discourage my son from following in his papa's venerable footsteps.
I'd be curious to hear views from bankers of all stripes. Are any of you concerned about your long-term prospects?
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Jonathan Guthrie, Financial Times, 12 April 2007
Business bloggers are worldwide and woeful
Business bloggers face a simple choice: write discreetly and bore readers witless, or reveal secrets and get fired. I imagine this latter fate, or the fear of it, has silenced Absolutely Confidential, an anonymous private banker who laid his industry bare in a series of droll posts earlier this year. It was a rare flash of talent in the over-hyped and overcrowded field of blogging. This recently marked its 10th anniversary, though the milestone merited little celebration. Bloggers too often combine awesome command of communications technology with an awesome lack of anything interesting to impart. Not so with wry, burnt-out Absolutely Confidential. He described how an American customer worth $300m (£152m) used accounts in Europe to direct secret payments to US senators. He hinted at the mob connections of an Italian client, whose hobbies included poisoning goldfish. And he detailed how a dear old English lady moved £14m of "undeclared money" to Singapore so that "Gordon Brown will never get his mitts on it".
This loose-tongued financial father confessor was equally compelling on the human comedy played out in the London offices of the Swiss private bank where he worked. Once, two rival rap stars who were customers squared up to each other in a double-booked meeting room. "My client's full portfolio was spread out on the table and he'd been making a [good] fist of understanding the little graphs," wrote our mole, "[But] he turned livid when he realised there was a witness to his financial prudence." Especially one who had impugned the honour of his momma in rhyme, alleging sexual misdeeds involving a spanner and a "piana".
The blogger's explanation for his indiscretions was that "it's curiously liberating to cross the line". Curiously liberating to toy with career suicide too, assuming Absolutely Confidential is not an elaborate hoax. Any hostile colleague stumbling on the blog could use it to have AC dismissed. The blogger might then rue comparing his bank's client reception facilities to those of a high-class brothel.
Most work-related blogs peter out because the blogger is bored or busy rather than jobless. These opuses resemble abandoned schoolgirl diaries of the kind that start with a 10-page outpouring on January 1, dwindle to a weekly one-line entry in February and cease in March with the words "Gary asked me out!!!"
The boardroom blogger Charles Dunstone, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse, began to falter himself last summer, as the company struggled to meet demand for its "free" broadband offer. His posts have been sporadic and apologetic since. But shareholders must be glad Mr Dunstone is concentrating on his day job, rather than writing articles a helot in marketing could ghost with equal skill and greater regularity.
Tom Glocer, chief executive of Reuters, meanwhile exhibits a reassuring command of geekspeak in his blogs, waxing lyrical over "published and extensible symbology sets". Travelling to Bangalore, "home to over 1,600 Reuters employees", he reflects, is "always an exhilarating visit for me because of the talent and enthusiasm of our staff". Exhilarating for Reuters' finance director, too, given low Indian labour costs.
It is hard for bosses of quoted businesses to blog except as happy-clappy corporate cheerleaders, which is dull for readers and easy for smart-arses like me to ridicule. This explains why few executives bother blogging in the cynical UK. The practice has taken deeper root in the US, where personal enthusiasm is not regarded as evidence of poor breeding, and bloggers include Bob Lutz of GM and Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems. There are, apparently, 70m blogs on the internet, although statisticians have yet to estimate how many are written by male IT contractors with poor personal hygiene and no women friends. My guess is 69m. Thanks to the internet, dweeb shall speak trivia unto dweeb. You know their schtick: "It beggars belief that Mandrill Software has re-released its package unbundler without fixing the bugs in the googleplexer!"
Outside the incestuous world of computing, professional arcana can be oddly compelling. Consider the amiable ramblings of the Savile Row tailor Thomas Mahon, who asks readers to identify a "jacket forepart" on his English Cut website. He then informs us with a flourish: "You won't be surprised to hear it's [part of] an Anderson & Sheppard coat, a classic DB of 11oz grey worsted."
Tupperware Man, a 40-something plastic container salesman, communicates equal enthusiasm for the "tower of Space Savers" accumulated by customers Leanne and Paul of Purley. There is even a photo. Another shows the blogger's "shrine" to the culinary icon Fanny Cradock. "I am back up there with the big girls," he crows camply. "In November I was Number Four Tupperware seller in the UK."
Mordant self-knowledge is absent from the musings of Cityboy, a bored London investment banker, who argues that anyone earning less than £500,000 annually in the City is struggling to make ends meet. Is a yearly holiday at the Sandy Lane hotel, Barbados, really vital to happiness, as Cityboy contends? I suspect Absolutely Confidential would have a pungent opinion. Come back AC. Us slack-jawed websurfers need you, even if your bank does not. The difference? We do not pay.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
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5 comments:
Outch... and here was I trying to start on a new career in PB. I should emigrate to India! and no claret for me!!!
When you hear them Indians talking, you'd be afraid, you'd be very afraid. And thinking where the new clients appear from, it's natural to get more and more Asian smooth talkers in your army.
offshore banking has often been associated with the underground economy and organized crime,however, legally, offshore banking does not prevent assets from being subject to personal income tax ....
All talk of a declining finance industry scares me to death as a 2nd year Finance major. Three years ahead of me and all the jobs I've been planning can be outsourced to India within that time?
I certainly don't think so, but a creepy thought, nonetheless. History has shown, hasn't it, that outsourcing services is not quite what outsourcing production has been.
I, for one, don't understand a word an Indian guy says..
Are you not aware of the wholesale corruption which is rife in India?
I don't think clients would feel too comfortable with the prospect, even if they were Indian themselves.
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