Household HSBC Watch

HSBC routes calls to Philippines

HSBC is to hire 500 people in the Philippines

UK banking giant HSBC is to set up a call centre in the Philippines to handle customer service and backroom operations, company officials say.
The bank will initially hire 500 people for the operation, to be based on the outskirts of Manila.

HSBC said last year that it was cutting 4,000 jobs at its UK call centres over the next three years.

Will Household International call centers in the U.S. be next? Will those jobs go to the Philippines or India? It remains to be seen. Rather than retrain personnel from the former predatory lender, now a wholly owned subsidiary of HSBC, it is more cost effective to transfer the jobs overseas.

Household employees previously effected claim they were given new positions and few jobs were eliminated. Historically it is routine to see 10 percent cutbacks whenever a merger takes place. HSBC purchased Household International, a troubled predatory financial firm, in 2002 amid lawsuits and a nationwide settlement in the United States.

In 2005 analysts expect to see 20,000 jobs eliminated from HSBC’s Household subsidiaries throughout the United States, some of which will go overseas.

HSBC intends to pump “several million” dollars into the Philippines project which will be located at the Northgate Cyberzone, in Alabang, south of Manila, the firm’s officials told correspondents.

The company already has service centres in India, Malaysia and China. The future is quite clear for call center employees in the United States. The Philippines is rated in the top 10 of dangerous locations around the globe. Before the closure of U.S. military locations Subic Bay (Navy) and Clark Airbase (Air Force) it was estimated that over 250,000 prostitutes serviced the Philippines, many of whom claimed they were college students.