Scotland has already benefited from the trend towards outsourcing, with the financial services sector attracting thousands of well-paid jobs.

The country has been particularly successful in the relatively new industry of asset servicing. US banks such as State Street and Citi have chosen it as a base from which they offer European fund managers a variety of services - including investment accounting, performance measurement and treasury functions.

But how will this process fare during the economic downturn that has engulfed the sector?

A recent report by the Management Consultancies Association, based on a survey of members of the British Bankers' Association, predicted the credit crunch would drive a new of outsourcing and offshoring in financial services as cash became tighter.

Fiona Czerniawska, author of the report, said the credit crunch was a wake-up call for the financial services sector.

"Many institutions which have so far ignored the benefits of outsourcing are being forced to revisit it because of financial constraints and liquidity problems," she said. "Often they have failed to integrate and are still lumbering under a weight of legacy systems and processes and carrying both unnecessary variable cost and balance sheet assets."

The report said outsourcing tended to be counter-cyclical: in good times, companies might not see it as a priority, in spite of the cost benefits available.

"The credit crunch has driven people who previously weren't bothered to dust off their plans and have a look at it again," says Bill Mew of IBM. "Financial constraints and liquidity problems have been driving all forms of outsourcing."

Outsourcing has developed over the years from companies farming out responsibility for their IT systems, to the outsourcing of routine business processes - such as claims processing for insurers - to knowledge process outsourcing, which provides services that involve high-value decision-making, such as calculating net asset values or doing equity research for fund managers.

Andrew Rigby, who last year became a partner with Brodies, the Edinburgh law firm, believes Scotland could add billions of pounds to its output by using its expertise to capture more of the fast-growing global market for business process outsourcing, forecast to be worth $323bn by 2011.

"We only need to capture a small share of that global market to make a real difference to our bottom line," says Mr Rigby, who has spent most of his career in London, specialising in information technology and outsourcing.

Mr Rigby says that with the proposed merger of HBOS and Lloyds TSB, and potentially thousands of job losses on the horizon, Scotland needed to develop an industry which would ensure that talent did not fade away.

Global volatility is changing the face of how the financial services industry would look in Scotland, and Mr Rigby says he has already seen evidence that the number of outsourcing deals by banks was increasing.

"Many banks in the City of London will be looking to reduce costs. Support services such as equity research and credit risk management could easily be moved to Scotland," he says.

"Why pay huge accommodation costs in the City or Canary Wharf when you could be paying up to 50 per cent less in Scotland?"

Mr Rigby is behind a new think tank, called the Outsourcing Hub Initiative, which has brought together business leaders, academics and economic development officials to consider how Scotland could benefit from its strengths in financial services, life sciences and energy to develop its capabilities.

He says a list of the top 30 up-and-coming countries for offshore services included Argentina, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Romania - but not Scotland.

"There is no reason why Scotland cannot position itself as a good base for outsourcing," says Mr Rigby. "In the central belt, communications are very good, there is a large workforce and good universities - we should try to bring everyone together and encourage international companies to set up outsourcing centres.

"The idea is that not only do we service existing companies in Scotland, but we start to provide services globally."

Mr Rigby has called on the Scottish government to encourage urgently the development of an outsourcing industry by helping global outsourcing companies to settle in Scotland, making money available to help entrepreneurs to establish outsourcing businesses and setting up an Outsourcing Centre of Excellence, bringing together the public and private sectors and the academic community.

"As outsourcing will become the norm in the financial services sector, there is a danger that Scotland will lose out by not having an outsourcing industry," he says.

"Even Scottish financial companies that want to outsource in Scotland would find it difficult to find companies that have the skill and experience. These potential services, in the absence of a Scottish-based industry, might inevitably go elsewhere."