A rumour in Wall Street was heard on Friday. It's about the trading of some part or all shares of New York-based Citigroup to surpass the difficulty of the global financial chaos.

As a result of global restructuring, the American financial giant Citigroup will require expansion of regional BPO hubs and they anticipate of creating 1,000 new jobs and tripling its workforce in the Philippines this year. They selected our country to be a regional hub of excellence for business process outsourcing (BPO) because of better skilled workers and attractive labor costs.

According to Citibank country business manager Mark Jones, Citi is planning of repositioning in Asia-Pacific but they will still focus on growth. The reassessment of the efficiency of their operations is always done even during the downtrend in the global financial markets. Being optimistic in the progress of the company is fine than reducing head count. At present, they have a staff of about 500 in the country. Additional 1,000 is expected this year to go on with their plans of building processing centers and expanding their domestic banking business. Last week in New York, Citigroup had announced their plans of cutting more than 50,000 jobs or about 14 percent of its workforce to survive the global financial market instability. The bank could not maintain its existing staff in the Philippines because they are investing greatly in systems and processes to formulate more competent operations. Potential lay-offs happened unavoidably when there is a need of upgrading the systems.

For them, it's going to be a tough year globally but they are preparing for it positively. [via]