So some employees of the Dublin office are being laid off in favor of the the new Global Center of Excellence in Poland and MetLife GOSC in Noida. Estimated timeline by Q4 2019, probably October.
Question is, where does the centralization of services stop, what does the future hold for operational teams throughout Europe?
Are there any other examples in Europe of moving in-country services to one of these centers?
Did this happen? Moving 130 jobs to Poland?
Agree. It is a conundrum to predict. But MetLife could use labor from a country without selling anything or much within that country.
This news about Generali really is quite strange. I suppose without the details we won't be able to understand but it seems odd that Dublin are transferring shared services to Poland and now they are thinking about selling Poland. Guessing the next move from MetLife is a complete conundrum.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/generali-said-talks-buy-metlife-071454146.html
"(Bloomberg) -- Assicurazioni Generali SpA is in early talks to buy the Central European assets of MetLife Inc. as the Italian insurer seeks to expand through acquisitions in high-growth markets, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
"The business may be worth more than 2 billion euros ($2.24 billion) and is concentrated in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, the people said, asking not to be identified as the plans aren’t public."
Allegedly 130 staff going to be required in Poland to takeover the laid off roles. This is huge. With new CEO taking over soon apparently a complete strategic review is taking place. The question now is: how far is Khalaf willing to go to get these OPEX savings?
It's a race to the bottom.
For a while Ireland was the low cost place with educated workers. But, the Poles must be cheaper.
The EU privacy regulations might limit some work from leaving the EU. So the centralization might stop within the EU itself. Might.
Bigger picture for Europe is that its not a big piece of MetLife's business, isn't growing much and has tons of regulations and associated costs of compliance. I wouldn't be surprised if Met tried to sell large chunks of the European business.