Wachovia's Change of Heart

Businessweek
The bank took a long time to discover the virtues of outsourcing -- but now it admits they're irresistible. Still, it's not sending any call-center work overseas While many other large corporations were rushing headlong into offshoring, Charlotte (N.C.)-based Wachovia (WB ) was content to sit on the sidelines -- until now. By the middle of this year, Wachovia will have outsourced 500 to 1,000 jobs, with plans to move an additional 3,000 or so by the end of 2007.
Most, but not all, of those jobs are going to India. An undisclosed number of human resource slots are being outsourced to Hewitt Associates, which will perform some HR functions for Wachovia right down the street from its Charlotte headquarters. SOUL-SEARCHING. Why the change of heart? Peter Sidebottom, director of corporate development and strategic initiatives for Wachovia, says that with a couple of major bank acquisitions on its hands at the time—the bank has pulled off two large-scale mergers with other regional banks so far this decade—Wachovia had a lot on its plate, and knew it could extract plenty of cost savings just from those two mergers. "We felt we had a lot of opportunities to save money without going offshore," says Sidebottom. more...