Mr Whitson was in the city to attend the inauguration ceremony of HSBC's global back-office processing center in Hyderabad. The Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu inaugurated the center on Monday. Talking about the recent joint venture with Merrill Lynch, Mr Whitson said that the new joint venture company will commence e-business operations in Canada and Australia by the end of December 2000. The company will have an equity capital of $1 billion invested in the ration of 50:50, he said. According to Mr Whitson, the venture will be the first international online banking and investment services company. "We service individual customers across the world, except those in the US. The pilot will be launched in the UK by the end of this year and will be operational in the country by early next year," he added.

HSBC's CEO (Indian operations) Zarir J Cama said, "The company has proposed a further investment of about $6 million as part of it expansion programme that is spread over two phases." So far, the group had invested about $3 million on establishing the present infrastructure, he revealed.

This is the second global service center established by the group, the first being set up in Guangzhou, China. The back-office process center has about 200 operators, whose strength will be increased to 1,000 in two years' time. The center is now operating the group's subsidiaries based in the United Kingdom.