These are turbulent times for anyone associated with offshoring. For many years, a wave of offshoring was driven by the financial services industry. Banks and insurance firms needed armies of back-office staff to process accounts or claims and take calls from customers. Yet these are the organisations hardest hit by the credit crunch, and now that the crunch has escalated into full-blown recession, almost everyone is suffering. So what is happening to offshoring now?
Offshoring is doing just fine. As the scale of this crisis started to become clear, most company executives initiated cost-cutting measures. The road to survival in a recession depends on both reducing ongoing costs and being able to fix future costs with some predictability. Outsourcing, and particularly offshore outsourcing, allows this and so even though it has been taking longer to get budget approval, major projects are still being approved.
