Higher-skilled City jobs heading offshore next

Higher-paid City jobs will follow call centre and back office admin roles offshore over the next five years, warns financial consultancy Troika.

The consultancy’s research suggests that as many as 15,000 higher-paid jobs will go to offshore locations such as India over the next five years.

It calculates that 100,000 financial services jobs will move abroad in total over the same period.

Troika’s managing director Andrew Stewart said: “We saw last year that companies – particularly in the financial services sector – are comfortable with outsourcing some aspects of their business. The disaggregation of value chain and outsourcing components is now widely accepted as a business strategy.”

While until now the majority of offshoring has been back office functions and call centres, now more complex and higher-paid jobs - such as finance, research, human resources and marketing - are starting to move offshore as well, Stewart said.

And he said that offshoring models now under discussion involve keeping the call centre in UK to ensure customers are happy, while offshoring expensive back office functions that do not need to be performed in UK, such as finance and human resources.