Investment bank Merrill Lynch is reviewing jobs at its operations in Dublin and is likely to move some of them to India in the first half of next year.

However, a spokesman for the company stressed that the company would still be maintaining staff numbers in Ireland at 850 employees, as it would continue to hire in other areas.

The company said it was creating 33 jobs in its wealth management business in the area of fund administration in Dublin early next year and that it had created 40 jobs in July with the opening of its research, development and innovation centre.

The company, which has been in the Republic since 1995, has hired an outsourcing firm to assess whether jobs in its settlements, cash management and data integrity sections can be outsourced to India. It is likely that some of these jobs will move to India. The company's staff is split between the Treasury Building in Dublin 2 and offices in Leopardstown, south Dublin.

The company's spokesman said a decision on the outsourcing would be made in the second quarter of 2008. He said it was also looking at creating more jobs in Dublin to support the company's fund administration business.

The company wants to create higher value jobs in Ireland. It said the aim was to reduce the number of "transactional" roles in Dublin, replacing them with more "complex knowledge-processing" roles.

Merrill Lynch said it had a "maximum capacity" to employ up to 950 people in Dublin. It plans to cut jobs in some areas of its global operations and create positions elsewhere in an effort to "evaluate what work is being done where, so operations can be optimised in terms of quality, service and cost". The jobs in wealth management here are being created as a result of job cuts in Jacksonville, Florida.