Your account
information will now be accessible to call center workers in the Philippines.
Bank of America, which
last fall announced plans to lay off 30,000 workers, is about to go on a hiring spree—overseas.
America's second-largest
bank is relocating its business-support operations to the Philippines,
according to a high-ranking Filipino government official recently quoted in the
Filipino press. The move, which includes a portion of the bank's customer service
unit, comes less than three years after Bank of America received a $45 billion federal bailout.
Roman Romulo, deputy
majority leader of the Philippine House of Representatives, bragged to the Manila Standard Today earlier
this month that the Philippines "has secured its place as the world's
fastest-growing outsourcing hub." Romulo pointed out that BofA is the last
of the "big four" US banks to move their business-support network to
his island nation, where the average family makes $4,700 a year.
A spokesman for Bank of
America, Mark Pipitone, was unable to provide additional information about the
bank's off shoring plans on Friday. "We have employees and operations
where we can ensure that we best serve our customers and clients," he told
me in an email.
The bank's outsourcing
comes amid rising concerns about the security of customers' financial data in
the hands of foreign contractors. In March, undercover reporters for England's Sunday
Times met in India with "IT consultants" who claimed they
were call center workers and offered to sell them credit card and
medical information for 500,000 Britons—including account holders at major
banks such as HSBC.
To prevent similar
scandals from rocking the Philippines, Romulo is pushing a law that would
require Filipino companies to "protect the integrity and confidentiality
of any personal information collected from their clients, in compliance with
international privacy standards," according to the Filipino television
network ABS/CBN News.
US banks already are
operating call centers in
the Philippines, "despite the fact that they haven't actually passed this
rudimentary legislation," says Shane Larson, legislative director for the
Communication Workers of America (CWA), which represents 150,000 American call
center workers. The Indian government is ahead of the Philippines in passing
data privacy laws, notes the union, but those laws specifically exempt the call
center industry. And that could lead to problems: In a 2005 survey by
PricewaterhouseCoopers, 85 percent of the Indian outsourcing companies that
responded said they had experienced information security breaches in the
previous year.
In a 2010 report on the
offshoring of technical jobs, New
York's Department of Labor concluded that data security in the medical and
financial fields is "of critical concern" and that "other
nations' legal systems (especially in developing countries such as India)
require reform to match that of the US with respect to privacy and computer
security."
Needless to say, the
outsourcing is bad news for an already hurting US call center industry, which
has shed some 500,000 jobs during the past four years—about 10 percent of the
total. The CWA hopes to reverse this trend by pushing the US Call Center and
Consumer Protection Act, a bill that would make any company that outsources
call center jobs ineligible for federal loans and
grants.
In addition to the
"frustrations" of dealing with customer-service workers halfway
around the globe, "there is the bigger picture of how opaque the process
is, and, as a result, some of the security questions that are raised,"
says Larson of the CWA. "I think Americans deserve to know to whom they
are speaking and to where their information is going."
