Opinion: Why I don't trust offshore customer service

How comfortable are you with giving your personal details to call centre staff in foreign countries? Simon Moores doesn't like it one bit.

Something hasn't been quite right with the Barclays online banking site this week. As I write this column, I'll 'ping' it one more time to be sure - and the result is a 'no response from server' message, so all is not well in the wonderful world of online finance.

Being curious as to the cause and wanting to know if a client payment had made its way by Bacs into my business account, I decided to call the Barclays helpline. This was answered by a pleasant young woman with an Indian accent, who requested my online account information.

"Are you in Mumbai by any chance?" I asked.

"Yes," she answered.

"Do you know your website is only working intermittently, if at all?"

"I'll have to report it," she said. "But let me help you log on to your account."

"But I can't," I said. "The server is timing out."

Rather than continue, I said I would try Barclays in the UK, easier for both of us I thought, but then discovered the helpline number I had didn't offer any useful options.

So now, if I can publish this column fast enough, perhaps Barclays will notice there's a problem with their website. Is it a server issue I wonder or something more dramatic? A denial of service attack perhaps?

Regardless of what's causing the outage, the conversation with the woman in Mumbai raised another question in my mind - one echoed by a recent news story on how India is creating a new regulatory body, spearheaded by IT trade association Nasscom, to improve the level of security for the country's offshore IT services and business process outsourcing companies in the wake of incidents of call centre data theft.

Many - if not most - of our financial services businesses, even government departments, are, in the interests of greater profits, ruthlessly outsourcing their customer service centres and support desks to the cheapest locations on earth. India, with its high standards of education and command of the English language, is a natural choice for finance.

The Nasscom story illustrates a fundamental weakness in our search for cheaper outsourcing. We're sending the responsibility for safe-guarding data to countries where legislation and law-enforcement efforts to deter the risk of fraud and identity theft are not in any way comparable with the UK.

Would you feel comfortable with storing your personal and financial information - and having it routinely accessed - in countries outside Europe? I certainly don't. I have little enough confidence in our own Home Office, let alone some other government.

So when the woman in Mumbai asked me for my account information, I was reluctant to part with any details - simply based on my experience of global internet crime.

I'm sure she's locked in a soundproof cubicle in a steel vaulted data centre with proper physical security but that doesn't make me feel any better - knowing that the real-life counterparts of Tom Cruise and the Mission Impossible team are out there looking to discover how much money I don't have in my Barclays online current account.