Deja-Vu Times: Ovum: Enterprise fears over finance and accounting offshoring

Friday 6 May 2011

Ovum: Enterprise fears over finance and accounting offshoring

Enterprises view outsourcing finance and accounting (F&A) processes to overseas companies as a “high-risk strategy” as they continue to shun it in favour of in-house workers, an Ovum survey has found.

Ovum interviewed chief financial officers and senior financial executives at UK and US enterprises with a turnover of more than $500 million. The survey revealed that they see offshoring their F&A operations as posing a greater risk than cloud computing. Twenty-nine per cent of respondents said they viewed cloud computing as posing an unacceptable risk, compared to 38.5 per cent for offshoring to India and 44.2 per cent for offshoring to South & Central America.

Peter Ryan, Ovum lead analyst, commented: “Our survey found that offshoring to low-cost locations was deemed to be very high-risk, and the companies we spoke to expressed a strong desire to keep these functions with their current employees.”