After he lost his job at J.P. Morgan, he collected unemployment for three months before he found a new job at a financial services company he prefers not to name. He's now an IT designer, not a programmer. The job is more complex than merely cranking code. He must understand the broader imperatives of the business and relate to a range of people. "It's more of a synthesis of skills," he says, rather than a commodity that can be replicated in India. Kirwin still believes the job is "offshorable," though I'm less certain.

Take the mortgage business. Here much of the opportunity is in the data-intensive servicing functions. Insurance tax and escrow processing, early collections calling, and much of the customer service call-center function can be offshored along with at least a part of loan-service setup, post-closing documentation, manual payoff processing, account balancing, statementing, and refinancing. Many are considering offshoring select origination functions, including application processing, direct sales, credit scoring and approval, and verification of title. Overall savings could be 10% to 15% of noninterest costs.

A similar analysis of any company's corporate center would show that about a quarter of those positions are offshorable as well. So the savings can be enormous even if some operations are kept onshore for redundancy.

HCL Insys is targeting companies with a strong customer base and sound market strength for the takeover, Chowdhry said, adding it would look at those companies whose business was offshorable to India.