A lawmaker supporting the country’s booming business process outsourcing (BPO) industry predicted Thursday that emerging number one US bank JP Morgan Chase and Co. would soon aggressively offshore more back office jobs to the Philippines.

After acquiring Bear Stearns Companies Inc. in March and Washington Mutual Inc. (WaMu) in September, JP Morgan has emerged has the largest US bank in terms of market capitalization, surpassing Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc.

“Among US banks, JP Morgan is the most comfortable with the Philippines. The bank has been here for 47 years. It has become totally acclimatized to our political and economic conditions,” Catanduanes Rep. Joseph Santiago said in a statement.

JP Morgan first outsourced customer support jobs to the Philippines in 2003 by putting up a 900-seat contact center in Makati City. The US bank recently launched a new 1,400-seat contact center in Taguig City.

The chairman of the House information and communications technology committee said that WaMu, now owned by JP Morgan, has been a key client of PeopleSupport Inc., which runs 3 contact centers that employ around 8,000 college-educated, fluent English-speaking Filipinos.

“Our sense is, now that it has become larger, JP Morgan would be inclined to build up in a way its contact centers and other back offices here,” Santiago said.

He added that he expects the American International Group (AIG) to sell its local outsourcing subsidiary, AIG Business Processing Services, Inc. (AIG-BPSI).

AIG-BPSI provides back office operations and contact support services for AIG businesses worldwide.

Information technology-enabled service industries have been a key driver of Philippine economic and employment growth.

Driven mainly by contact center and back office contractors, the industries are expected to fully engage 920,764 Filipinos and generate up to $12.2B in annual revenues by 2010, according to the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPA/P).