Westpac team in India to discuss outsourcing plans

A team of experts of leading Australian financial firm Westpac is reportedly in India to discuss their future offshoring plans with about eight Indian business process outsourcing firms, including Infosys and TCS.

According to The Australian report on Monday, it was understood that the bank's top technology executives have travelled around India over the past two weeks to meet with about eight outsourcing companies.

Two outsourcers would be selected to perform a range of work and are set to benefit as Westpac spends hundreds of millions of dollars over the next couple of years to update core banking systems and integrate complex technology functions as part of the 12-billion-Australian-dollars acquisition of St George Bank, the newspaper said.

Several sources confirmed that Westpac contingent met with various companies including Accenture, IBM, EDS, Wipro Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, it said.

However, Westpac refused to comment on the issue.

The daily said it is believed that Westpac planned to set up a two-vendor panel which can be called on when necessary to perform a range of work.

St George has already outsourced the support and maintenance of key legacy systems to Indian firm Infosys.

There has been a surge in local technology work over the past year, spurred by several legacy system overhauls and consolidation across the financial services industry.

An industry source said banks had been forced to look for resources overseas because of the limited technology talent pool in Australia.

Earlier, the bank's chief Gail Kelly had announced that she had halted the offshoring of Australian-based jobs.