About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Credit Crunch is Likely to Drive Institutions to Offshoring or Outsourcing, Says Northern Trust’s Davis

Subscribe to our newsletter

The current market climate has meant that institutions are under serious pressure to cut costs and improve operational efficiency and this may mean they decide to go the outsourcing route, said Liam Davis, vice president of global data management at Northern Trust. “We need to do more with less and provide a higher level of service to our clients and offshoring is a way to reduce costs and allow institutions to focus on meeting these needs,” he explained to the FIMA 2008 delegation.

Cost containment and the requirement for operational efficiency are two common themes across the market at the moment, according to Davis. Offshoring allows for greater scalability and this makes a compelling argument, he continued. Northern Trust established an offshore captive in Bangalore in November last year and the team has been growing ever since. “I would recommend that firms fully document their operational processes and provide ongoing support to their offshore teams to ensure success,” he said. “Also, you can’t send a system offshore that is not working properly onshore.”

Cost savings of offshoring can be anywhere between 20-50%, according to Davis, based on two surveys that he has produced for his firm. Remote governance can be tricky, hhe acknowledged, but he suggested that firms retain a team onshore (much like the earlier panel) to oversee operations. Metrics and performance must be measured and both onshore and offshore operations must be running on the same platforms and in the same operating environment.

“Offshoring is a revenue saver in terms of staff, operating costs and scalability. Costs are also more predictable than recent reports would give you to believe,” he added. “It is an efficiency saver and we have been able to accommodate the massive growth that our business has experienced over the last year due to the capacity increase the offshoring has provided. We have also been enabled to do some re-engineering around the support of our reference data and inject more quality into our operations.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Streamlining trading and investment processes with data standards and identifiers

Financial institutions are integrating not only greater volumes of data for use across their organisation but also more varieties of data. As well, that data is being applied to more use cases than ever before, especially regulatory compliance and ESG integration. Due to this increased complexity of institutions’ data needs, however, information often arrives into...

BLOG

S&P’s Capital IQ Pro Flagship Offers Visible Alpha with View to Expansion

Behind every stock analyst’s financial forecast report is a detailed data model that tracks the company so that they can arrive at a view on that asset. Until about eight years ago it was difficult to prise open those reports to understand the thinking behind the headline numbers. Visible Alpha helped change that. Founded by...

EVENT

RegTech Summit New York

Now in its 9th year, the RegTech Summit in New York will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the North American capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...