A day before the release of the 4^th quarter financial results of outsourcing company Convergys Corporation (NYSE:CVG), they announced plans to lay off many of its employees, without disclosing how many and which locations would be affected.

Switzerland-based financial services provider UBS (NYSE: UBS) is reportedly selling its business process outsourcing (BPO) and knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) units. And is said to be in talks with Indian offshoring giants Infosys Technologies Limited (NASDAQ: INFY) and Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT). The UBS Indian Service Center and UBS Krakow centre has an estimated value of $200 million, reports The Economic Times.

Reading the Indian mainstream news yesterday about India Inc.’s strategy to expand operations in Eastern Europe and hire multilinguals to serve the European finance and accounting sector does not surprise me anymore. In my April article, I talked about how Europe is becoming more comfortable with outsourcing not just to its neighboring countries but also to Asia particularly to the Philippines. The following month, I wrote an article on Philippine Outsourcing re-focusing its efforts to the European market instead in anticipation of US political and trade condition changes.

The U.S. newspaper industry faces many problems from decreased circulation and advertising revenue to shareholder pressure. It would be a common thing for publishers to consider outsourcing jobs or the whole departments locally or to other countries to reduce costs. In fact, financial news service Reuters has a news center in Bangalore, India with more than 1,600 employees, including an editorial team of 100 American journalists, was deployed to write about corporate earnings and broker research on U.S. companies.

The collapse of Wall Street has led to numerous opportunities for the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, specifically to higher value (KPO) outsourcing providers. The medium-to-long term effect of the US sub-prime and financial crisis will accelerate adoption of global sourcing as financial firms embrace offshoring to cut costs. This is exactly what Dallas-based Everest Research Institute found in its recent study entitled “Global Sourcing in Banking, Capital Markets and Insurance”.

The global economic slowdown continues to have a direct impact on the outsourcing industry, with contracts decreasing by the day but at the same time brings new opportunities for more offshore services. Outsourcing companies continue to deliver services that benefit these companies and have found a way to increase their margins through clinical data management.

Companies are now considering Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) after the success of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).