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To do so, they are sending emissaries like Egger to India. He isn’t the only Swiss banker to head there: Last year, Credit Suisse banker Gary Bullock left for Wipro – to manage the Indian firm’s technology for the Swiss bank.

Goldman Sachs has maintained Bangalore as its largest global office outside of the U.S. for years. Contrary to popular perception, it is a «knowledge hub» for highly-skilled staff with considerable strategic responsibilities, not a call center. UBS may be emulating this model, not just in a bid to save costs but also to remain technologically and intellectually relevant in an industry hamstrung by costs.

Swiss «Nearshoring»

UBS has been in India since the 1990s, but the so-called insourcing efforts were kickstarted by efforts to move jobs out of pricey Switzerland when the Swiss franc began surging. UBS and Credit Suisse both headed for Poland, where they opened up service centers. Both banks also maintain extensive U.S. centers – UBS in Nashville, TN and Credit Suisse in Raleigh, NC.

UBS has even defected from Zurich, sending some staffers to Schaffhausen, a cheaper city on the Swiss border to Germany, and will open another center with roughly 600 people in Biel next year. It also hiring in Manno in southern Switzerland, where it is building up an artificial intelligence research center, as finews.asia reported earlier this year.

Shunning Vendors

UBS’ in Wroclaw serves as the blueprint for what Egger wants to do in India. In India, Egger oversees two hubs – Pune and Mumbai – which UBS wants to use as global so-called «insourcing» hubs. In other words, instead of paying big vendors like Cognizant, Wipro, or Infosys, UBS wants to do it themselves.

Before the crisis, UBS invested millions in a service center in Hyderabad, only to offload it to Cognizant for $450 million in 2009. In 2013, it began quietly building up its own capacity in India and elsewhere. Today, 11,000 staff work at UBS in India; just 8,000 of them are employed through external providers – the remainder are UBS employees.