Bringing India to You

Despite the controversy over sending technology jobs to other countries, outsourcing has become a fact of life for financial institutions. Stats suggest that outsourcing by the securities market is growing at a rate of 25 percent per year. Many tier-one firms have either taken the plunge or are toe-dipping in the practice. Yet most mid-tier and smaller firms are only beginning to explore their options.

Therefore, WS&T is planning to host an executive summit on business-process outsourcing aimed particularly at those smaller firms. Because we understand that choosing a service provider, and essentially a partner, is time-intensive and includes thorough due diligence, our event aims to make this process more seamless for the busy executive.

Our initial concept was to bring you to India, by planning a well-organized tour of the service providers' campuses, setting up discussions with the Indian government, providing networking opportunities with peers, and providing research in the form of a conference.

As excited as we were about this idea, we quickly realized that being travel agents and tour guides is not our forte. However, bringing objective content around an area where there is a need for information is our strength.

As a result, our goal is to bring India to you. The concept is to provide a two-and-a-half-day event in a warm East Coast location, where we would provide a lineup of knowledgeable and provocative speakers to help you thoroughly explore the prospect of outsourcing to India. Speakers, with expertise in financial services, will outline the types of business processes that are well-suited for outsourcing, the pros and cons of outsourcing to India as compared to other countries, the due diligence process, creating service-level agreements, and managing the partnership after the contracts are signed. We'll also provide a separate afternoon of workshops to help you evaluate the outsourcing providers. And to the extent that we can, we hope to bring the flavor of India to you. The event would be free to our readers who are focused on outsourcing.

I've dedicated my editor's note to this topic to find out if this type of forum is of interest, and if so, I hope that you will e-mail me with feedback. In addition, if you'd like to be on our invite list - you must be a senior-level executive from a financial-services firm - please send me an e-mail at [email protected]