Forget about Manilla or Hyderabad. All banks are aggressively doing outsourcing, although we are very late in the game than our peers (as usual, unsurprisingly).
One thing often not discussed here is another international elephant in the room, although I know some people who are really unhappy on how things are being run in International.
The thing is…we barely show up in any league tables and can’t get our act together here, yet we have a huge CIB banking team in Europe fairly comparable in size to the US? And can’t believe most of them are Directors or above?
There are job cuts left and right across all LOBs including CIB here and we are aggressively shrinking and selling our bread and butter businesses in the US all the while subsidising an unprofitable, unscalable international business with an extremely high, unsustainable efficiency ratio? What is exactly the end game here? Keep throwing money at the problem to see if its sticks? But we’ve been doing that now for how many years? Time to scale back or exit?
International is not making any money. Returns are abysmally low compared to the US. Without constant subsidisation or committing huge capital to “win” some low profile, small investment banking deals, International is guaranteed to remain in a sorry state. Invest the resources here where we have the connections and relationships before they go away!
If it were the 80s or 90s maybe all of this sh**show (subsidising international business at the cost American business) may have made sense and could’ve even been considered as a long term investment but as an irrelevant newcomer with extremely limited product capability outside of the US, we are just wasting our resources and money everyday.
With no or extremely weak controls in place, we are setting ourselves for a potential foreign consent order or MRA this time. I’m sure none of us wants that. It’s time to really rethink international and stop trying to be a wannabe Citi or BOA. We’re just too late, wake up!