Posted on 09/07/2003 10:37:28 AM PDT by sarcasm
MUMBAI: Joining the likes of investment banking firms such as JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, US-based financial products and services provider Cantor Fitzgerald & Co has decided to set up a back office captive outfit in the country.
Cantor’s captive operations will carry out institutional and equity market research. The firm has already established small operations with close to 50 people in Mumbai. Estimates related to the number of jobs that will move to India and proposed plans to expand operations here were not available. The firm did not respond to an email sent by this paper.
Cantor was one of the worst-affected victims of 9/11 and lost one-third of its staff after the attack on the World Trade Center (WTC).
According to sources, the firm has decided to recruit a significant number of people in India to support its operations globally. The decision, has been consciously taken to avoid incurring huge expenditure on staff by employing people to replace those in expensive markets such as the US.
“The process of setting up an outfit in India is currently under way and would follow stepping up recruitments aggressively to support the same”, sources said. The back-office outfit would be on similar lines as that of firms such as JP Morgan, American Express, Merrill Lynch and HSBC in India.
US-based banking and financial services companies have benefited to the tune of $6 billion over the past four years by outsourcing work to Indian software vendors, or by setting up captive business process outsourcing (BPO) units, according to National Association of Software Service Companies (Nasscom).
Cantor provides financial services in the equity and fixed income capital markets. These include sales and trading, investment banking, market commentary and market data. The firm also provides trading and distribution services, product expertise as well as technology and customer service to institutional customers. It is also committed to philanthropy and has pledged to donate 25% of the profits it would otherwise distribute to its partners until 2006 to benefit the families of employees it lost on 9/11.
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