Global banks are feeling the coronavirus heat in India.
With several employees or their kin down with Covid, Wall Street banks with centres in top metros including Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune and Gurgaon, are moving some work to overseas locations.
About 200 employees at HSBC’s tech centre in Bengaluru are affected due to Covid, and its centres in China and Krakow have picked up work from Bengaluru.
Deutsche Bank, with 4,000 employees in Bengaluru and Pune, said it does not expect the pandemic to disrupt its operations as it has all the contingency plans in place.
Standard Chartered said last week that about 800 of its 20,000 staffers in India were infected. As many as 25% of employees in some teams at UBS are absent.
Wells Fargo
At Wells Fargo & Co’s offices in Bangalore and Hyderabad, work on co-branded cards, balance transfers and reward programs is running behind schedule. Some work is getting transferred to the Philippines, where staff is working overnight shifts to pick up the slack. The San Francisco-based bank employs about 35,000 workers in India to help process car, home and personal loans, make collections, and assist customers who need to open, update or close their bank accounts.
Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley, which has 6,000 employees in Mumbai and Bengaluru, said a small percentage of its staff
have been impacted due to the pandemic, though it is operating in a business-as-usual mode.
Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs’s Bengaluru centre which has over 6,000 employees across all the businesses, had close to a 48-hour impact as some of its employees were affected by Covid.
But the work was picked up by Salt Lake City in Utah that makes up the second-largest presence in North America. Work from India moved to London too in those 48 hours.
At UBS, with many of the bank’s 8,000 staff in Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad absent, work is being shipped to centres such as Poland. The Swiss bank’s workers in India handle trade settlement, transaction reporting, investment banking support and wealth management. Many of the tasks require same-day or next-day turnarounds.
Barclays Plc is shifting some functions were shifted to the UK from India.
Citigroup Inc said there’s currently no significant disruption, while Deutsche Bank AG said employees were working seamlessly from home.
Dire predictions
Nasscom, the key lobby group for India’s $194 billion outsourcing industry and its almost 5 million employees, has downplayed the threat to operations.
Experts have warned the crisis has the potential to worsen in the coming weeks, with one model predicting as many as 1,018,879 deaths by the end of July, quadrupling from the current official count of 230,168. A model prepared by government advisers suggests the wave could peak in the coming days, but the group’s projections have been changing and were wrong last month.