India coronavirus: Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and UBS caught up in crisis
- Friday saw the country post 414,188 new infections in the past 24 hours, another global record, as well as 3,915 deaths
- Banks have avoided major disruptions by shifting tasks to other offshore hubs but crisis has exposed vulnerabilities of outsourcing
About 8,300 miles east of Wall Street, on a stretch of Bangalore’s Outer Ring Road, sits what was once the heart of the global financial industry’s back office.
Before the pandemic, this cluster of glass-and-steel towers housed thousands of employees at firms like Goldman Sachs and UBS Group AG who played critical roles in everything from risk management to customer service and compliance.
Now the buildings are eerily empty. And with case counts soaring across Bangalore and much of India, work-from-home arrangements that have sustained Wall Street’s back-office operations for months are coming under intense strain. A growing number of employees are either sick or scrambling to find critical medical supplies such as oxygen for relatives or friends.
Standard Chartered said last week that about 800 of its 20,000 staffers in India were infected. As many as 25 per cent of employees in some teams at UBS are absent, said an executive at the firm who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job. At Wells Fargo & Co.’s offices in Bangalore and Hyderabad, work on co-branded cards, balance transfers and reward programmes is running behind schedule, an executive said.
India’s outbreak is intensifying even as vaccinations fuel economic recoveries in other parts of the world, heightening fears of a back-office bottleneck at a time when Wall Street firms have rarely been busier.