U.S. Financial Firms Bank On Shipping Much Office Work Overseas.(INTERNET & TECHNOLOGY)(Q & A)

Byline: DOUG TSURUOKA

Tough times are driving U.S. financial services companies to have more office work done overseas.

So says Andrea Bierce, a director at consultant A.T. Kearney Inc., a unit of Electronic Data Systems Corp.

Bierce says banks, brokerages and insurance firms find it's cheaper to have back-office work like accounting and employee benefits done in nations like India and Brazil, where wages are lower than in the U.S.

Tech-savvy workers in such areas process, check, calculate and enter data. They send the data back to the U.S. home office via the Net.

Some firms also are shifting call centers to countries with English-speaking populations, like Canada, Ireland and India.

Sometimes U.S. financial firms open their own offices abroad. Other times, they farm out the work to an outside vendor, an approach called offshore business processing outsourcing.