CHARLOTTE, N.C. —
Bank of America (BAC) Corp. may hire 1,500 people at its subsidiary after it opens in southern India this month, 50 percent more than previously disclosed, and the bank has reserved land that would allow for even more expansion.

Late last year, the bank said it eventually expected to have 1,000 people at its Continuum Solutions subsidiary in the software hub city of Hyderabad, but wouldn’t give specifics about work intended for the center.

Executives with the Charlotte-based financial giant told The Charlotte Observer that Continuum employees will initially work with corporate accounts drawn from London operations and later from the bank’s offices worldwide. In the future, Indian workers are likely to work with consumer information.

“We expect that this will be a successful though modest part of our overall strategy for supporting our businesses, so we need space for growth if we decide we want to grow it,” said Tim Arnoult, the bank’s technology and operations executive. “Our current thinking is that Continuum, if everything is successful, probably will top out around 1,500 people over about three years.”

Arnoult stressed that Continuum employment will be less than 1 percent of the bank’s work force, which jumped from fewer than 134,000 to more than 180,000 with its FleetBoston Financial Corp. acquisition, completed April 1.

The Indian startup marks Bank of America (BAC)’s latest step in moving work abroad, part of a cost-cutting trend called offshoring or foreign outsourcing that critics say is siphoning professional jobs to lower-wage countries, mimicking the exodus of factory jobs.

Arnoult acknowledged that Continuum will displace workers throughout the bank’s operations, but he couldn’t say how many or from which offices. The bank also has not said how much it expects to save with the move.

Those job losses come as workers worry about the additional 12,500 job cuts the bank plans over two years as part of its FleetBoston acquisition. The bank also will continue outsourcing software work to firms in India, a move employees have blamed for job losses.

Bank of America (BAC) has been contracting with firms in India to handle software development, testing and modernizing for about two years. When the bank went shopping for a site, suitors lined up across India.

“It’s a prestige client. The competition was intense for this marquee customer,” Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies, the Indian information technology industry’s trade group, said during an interview in New Delhi.

Every day, Bank of America (BAC), the country’s second-largest bank by assets, handles millions of transactions moving money around the world’s financial network. That requires thousands of people to double-check that every penny is accounted for. If an account doesn’t balance, somebody has to track down the problem.

“That will likely be a very substantial amount of the work we will do at Continuum,” Arnoult said.

At some point, the bank intends to have Continuum handle work for the huge consumer base it serves from New England to Southern California.

That means employees in India will have access to consumer information, such as account numbers. However, they would not see Social Security numbers or the extent of business a customer has with the bank, said bank spokeswoman Eloise Hale.

Employees are able to access only the information necessary to do their assigned job. Regular audits monitor compliance, Arnoult said. To reduce the risk of disruption from problems such as a power failure, the bank also allows only about one-fourth of a process to be performed in one location.

That means Continuum workers must coordinate with other bank employees - a key reason to use a company operation rather than a vendor, Arnoult said.

“It’s critical to us that the process…is executed according to standard approaches that we use everywhere else in the world,” he said.