mumbai call center

Barclaycard is shutting a call centre in Manchester with the loss of 630 jobs because it will be routing more customer queries to India.

The credit card arm of Barclays has decided to outsource more work to Mumbai and Delhi at a time when other financial services firms, notably Lloyds TSB, have decided to return customer call centres back to the UK.

Finance union Amicus said it was opposing the decision to shut the Manchester centre but said it was continuing to meet with the bank.

"At a time of increasing pressure on all staff in Barclaycard we believe it to be totally inappropriate for this large and highly profitable employer to be announcing closures and job losses," said Steve Pantak, an Amicus official.

While the Barclays group reported pre-tax profits of £7bn, the Barclaycard credit card arm had a more torrid time, reporting a 40% fall in profits to £382m because of a hefty provision to cover customers' unpaid debts.

Barclaycard did not give any information about how much it hoped to save as result of the closure but Antony Jenkins, the new chief executive of the credit card business, cited global factors as one of the reasons for moving business to India.

"Decisions like this are never easy and we will be doing everything we can to support those affected. Barclaycard's business is becoming more global and to stay successful we must change how we operate to reflect this," Mr Jenkins said.

Barclaycard receives up to 50,000 calls a day from its customers in the UK and until now these had largely been received in Manchester and Teesside although two out of 10 callers were already being routed to Indian call centres.

From July 16, when Manchester will shut, the calls that would have been taken there will be directed to Teesside and India, where Barclaycard is expecting to create another 200 jobs.

Barclaycard will continue to pay Manchester staff for another three months after the centre closes and is offering them help with finding new roles, possibly inside the wider Barclays group.

Amicus believes that the banking group has such a large presence in the north west of England that all the staff who are displaced should be able to find alternative work.

Other financial firms are pulling back their call centres in India. On Friday, Lloyds TSB told its staff that calls would no longer be directed to India but instead to its 10 call centres in the UK and, perhaps more significantly, directly to its branches. It shut an operation in Newcastle with the loss of some 900 jobs three years ago.

Unions claimed the decision was taken after customer complaints about the service in India although Lloyds TSB insisted it was because a new automated phone service was relieving pressure on call centres.

Barclaycard said it felt certain that the quality of service in India matched that from its UK call centres. "All our research shows that customers who go through Indian call centres are the same as in the UK," a Barclaycard spokesman said.