GUEST COMMENT: The reality about outsourcing pitchbooks to India

I read Joel Perlman's piece on outsourcing analysts to India with some interest. I suspect naïve M&A analysts may have felt a little apprehensive as a result.

If you're one of those analysts, you'll be pleased to hear that (in my opinion) any apprehension is badly misplaced.

Now, it's common knowledge that being an analyst in the M&A department of a big firm can involve some pretty mind-numbingly boring work. When the banks recruit the crème de la crème of graduates each year from disciplines like Neuroscience and Econometrics, the real outcome of this brain drain is that these (often autistically) intelligent kids end up formatting PowerPoint slides at 4AM, or frantically checking footnotes in an investment memorandum, in bed on a Sunday morning before a 10AM conference call.

I'm speaking from personal experience here. Perhaps the world would be a better place if these gifted students were not tempted by lucrative City careers. But that's not what this article is about.

When I was analyst, my experience - and that of my peers, was overwhelmingly that offshore teams couldn't be trusted to produce good quality work on time.

Spreadsheets came back badly formatted with accounting adjustments made which were of little relevance, and off-message, to the pitches. There's a reason why, long before incoming first-years are unleashed on a presentation, much less a live transaction, they're sent on a three-month training programme. It's to get you all to think in the same way - get the work down no matter what, take pragmatic shortcuts and explain afterwards, and never, ever "polish the turd."

Fans of offshoring note that the time difference works to the Mumbai team's advantage - they will claim that work can be delivered before the UK or the US goes to sleep and will be completed by the time we're back at our desks.

This assumes everything has been done well the first time. If there were any errors, we were faced with problem of having to pass the work back to India and wait another 24 hours. Most of the time we opted to fix it ourselves.

In my experience, the Indians working in offshore centres don't have top class academics. As far as the banks and consultancies are concerned, the only MBAs worth having are from about 5 business schools across the world. So if you indebted yourself a six-figure sum and spent two years slogging it out to get an MBA from Reading, sucks to be you.

If MBAs working for offshoring companies like Copal have really been educated at "top global educational establishments", one has to wonder what these hotshots are doing in Bangalore when the world's their oyster.

There will always be some work that the offshore guys can handle, like broad qualitative market studies with far-off deadlines, or maintaining trading comparables for obscure industry sub-sectors. But don't worry analysts. Many an all-nighter lies in store for you yet.