JPMorgan seen transferring more BPO jobs to Phl

MANILA, Philippines - The US-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. is likely to transfer more of its business support functions to Manila, generating more jobs for the country’s business process outsourcing (BPO) sector, a ranking administration lawmaker said yesterday.

House Deputy Majority Leader and Pasig City Rep. Roman Romulo said JPMorgan, which he described as the largest US-based financial holding firm by assets, is seen to move more of its support operations to the global in-house center (GIC) in Manila to reduce costs.

“Under tremendous pressure to slash costs, we see JPMorgan moving more business support activities to its back office in Manila over the next 24 months,” Romulo said in a statement.

“This augurs well for our fresh college graduates and young professionals looking for gainful outsourcing service jobs,” he said.

Pasig City is home to 16 Philippine Economic Zone Authority-registered information technology (IT) parks that in turn host a growing number of BPO firms.

Romulo is one of the key backers of the BPO industry in the country.

He said JPMorgan earlier bared plans to cut 17,000 jobs in America, or almost seven percent of its 258,965 global workforce by 2014, in a bid to generate at least $1 billion in annual operating cost-savings.

Romulo said global corporations “have aggressively conveyed non-core, labor intensive and IT-enabled business support jobs to the Philippines, a lower-cost location with ample supply of fluent English-speaking college graduates.”

“They have either established their own GICs in Manila, or contracted out the jobs to independent multinational BPO providers operating here,” he said.

By revenue, JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A.–Philippine Global Center has emerged as Manila’s largest GIC of a global corporation, the lawmaker said.

Established in 2005, the center generated almost P10 billion in revenues in 2011, and has a staff of more than 10,000 at The Net Plaza in Taguig City and at The Asiatown IT Park in Cebu City.

The center provides strategic support, including voice-based customer services, to JPMorgan’s various lines of business 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It supports card services, retail financial services (home lending, auto finance, education finance, telephone banking, business banking), and treasury and securities services.

The center also assists in human resources, performance improvement, quality assurance, IT, accounting, account servicing, collections, operations management, project management, and risk and compliance.

Other GICs in the Philippines are Citigroup Business Process Solutions Pte. Ltd.; Wells Fargo Philippines Solutions Inc.; Bank of America Continuum Philippines Inc.; Deutsche Knowledge Services Pte. Ltd.; Emerson Electric Asia Ltd.; IBM Daksh Business Process Services Philippines Inc.; IBM Business Services Inc.; IBM Solutions Delivery Inc.; HSBC Electronic Data Processing Philippines Inc.; Shell Shared Services Asia B.V.; Thomson Reuters Corp. Pte. Ltd.; Lexmark Research & Development Corp.; Chartis Technology & Operations Management Corp. Philippines; Manulife Data Services Inc.; and Dell International Services Philippines Inc.

The BPO industry is projected to produce $25 billion in revenues and directly employ 1.3 million Filipinos by 2016.