Offshore business process outsourcing services are expected to drive $1.8 billion worth of business, according to findings by Gartner Inc.

It also points out that India's BPO revenue is expected to grow from under $1 billion last year to $1.2 in the current year, representing 66 per cent of the overall offshore BPO market.

BPOs in India have grown at a fast pace, by as much as 70 per cent annually, as it employs over 100,000 people. Over 1,000 foreign companies have set up shop in India taking advantage of the country's large pool of cheap and skilled IT workforce.

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Financial services companies including Abbey, Barclays, HSBC, Standard Chartered, as well as insurance giants like Allianz, Aviva and Prudential have outsourced jobs to India. Other firms like British Airways, British Telecom and Tesco in the services sector, have equally moved plenty of jobs into the country.

"Insurance and banking are able to generate bulk of the savings purely because of the large proportion of processes they can outsource to India including claims processing, loans processing, data entry, data processing and client servicing through call centers in India," said senior officials at a leading foreign bank.

HSBC has created about 4,500 jobs in India at its three global resource centres in India and its software development company.

Standard Chartered Bank has created 3,000 jobs at its processing centre in Chennai and will enhance this to 4,500 by next year end, confirmed the bank's spokesperson.

Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Electronic Data Systems are among the top global computer giants planning to service their customers from facilities in low-wage countries like India, Mexico and Brazil. Reportedly, IBM plans to shift 4,730 programmers to India, China and elsewhere.

The UK-based Prudential Plc proposes to expand the number of projects it had initially anticipated to outsource to India, Jonathan Bloomer, Prudential Plc group chief executive said during his visit to Mumbai.

He added: "It is more an offshore centre than an outsourcing centre for the UK operations. On account of the quality of the people, we have been able to use it for many more projects than we had anticipated when we first set it up in February this year."

The company's plans to shift more customer-service jobs to India will translate into an annual savings of 16 million pounds.

The pressures of corporate entities in the UK and the US to provide shareholder returns makes it important for them to manage their costs, said Daniel Cotti, ABN Amro managing director & global head of global trade advisory.

"A large portion of these costs is on personnel, where India with its huge reservoir of skilled labour supporting information technology has an edge over other countries in terms of cheap labour," he added.

ABN Amro's global support centre in Chennai today supports 300 jobs, and this number could increase significantly as more offshore processes are handled in India, said Cotti.

German-based Allianz having set up an exclusive subsidiary for IT-related services will bring over 1,300 jobs to India over the next two years.

"Our outsourcing base Trinity (Willis' third largest BPO worldwide) in Mumbai should grow significantly. If we can continue with this growth, we should have 2,000-3,000 employees, from the existing 800-strong force," said Willis Group Holdings Ltd chairman and CEO Joe Plumeri. Willis' processing facility handles US and UK claims.