“Wall Street has to look at the world differently,” said Manoj Jain, the chairman of Pipal Research, a 400-person firm with offices in Chicago, Delhi and Gurgaon. Moving high-value jobs out of high-cost cities is “no longer a hypothesis,” he said.

Pipal has “more work than it can take” right now, he said, and is seeing new clients beyond United States banks, like investment management companies and European financial firms. Like analysts at most offshore research operations, Pipal’s number crunchers do not make recommendations, or generally put their name to the research they write. Instead, they work with the big-name bank or fund analyst to create the research that they want.

Permanently moving banking jobs out of New York or London is a touchy subject on Wall Street. Many investment banks, including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup, would not make executives available to discuss the topic.

Press officers for most banks asked not to be quoted or argued over semantics. For example, one spokesman said his bank’s fast-growing India support operations are not an outsourcing facility, but a “center of excellence”; another argued that large cost cuts at his bank’s New York and London headquarters were really “re-engineering” so the bank should not be included in such an article.

“Some of that is self-serving,” Octavio Marenzi, chief executive of Celent, said of the impulse to keep quiet. “If I admit that research analysts can be off-shored to India, that means that I could too.”

He said the “more advanced firms” will be able to use the cost differences and talent pools in India, and in the future in China, to their advantage.

A few banks have openly embraced off-shoring. Credit Suisse has 6,500 employees around the world working in lower-cost locations in India, Poland and Singapore. Of these about 500 are doing high-value jobs.