Business, usual, BPO, firms, despite

Business as usual for BPO firms despite frauds scare

07 Jul 2005 | (News)

It's business as usual for India's flourishing business process outsourcing (BPO) companies that rake in millions by doing back-end jobs for overseas firms despite the reported cases of data security breaches.

Industry representatives say while the flow of services contracts to Indian outsourcing companies continues unabated, domestic firms are also expanding operations in the country as well as in lucrative overseas markets.

"I think currently India is very strongly placed in view of our people skills and cost advantage to retain this leadership," said R. Sivadas, CEO of the Chennai-based Scope e-knowledge Centre, a leading knowledge process outsourcing company.

"The continued leadership will depend on players in India and our commitment to provide services that are better than anywhere else in the world. We have already shown that we are capable of doing this," Sivadas told IANS.

"One can't generalise based on one or two isolated (fraud) incidents. These incidents, on a much larger scale, happen all the time in the West."

Domestic BPO firms have come under the spotlight following an investigative report by Britain's highest-selling tabloid.

A Delhi-based website analyst allegedly sold an undercover reporter of The Sun details of 1,000 credit card and bank accounts held by Britons, as well as numbers of passports and credit cards - for a paltry sum of three pounds each.

The sting operation came close on the heels of the stealing of more than $350,000 from Citibank's customers in New York by some former and present employees of Indian call centre MphasiS.

Despite getting all the media attention, these cases have not been able to slow down the trend of shipping of jobs to Indian BPO firms that collectively earned $5.2 billion through exports of services in the fiscal year 2004-05.

Avance Technologies Ltd., a mid-size Indian tech firm, said last week it had tied up with a leading consultancy firm in the US for managing call centres.

Under the agreement, US-based SES-INC would outsource call centre jobs in the subcontinent to Avance Technologies. The revenue from this business would be nearly $316,000 per month.

Gecis Global, a joint venture technology outsourcing firm between GE and private equity firms General Atlantic and Oak Hill Capital, said on Tuesday it would set up a BPO centre in Romania.

The company said the Romanian facility would handle a variety of complex finance and accounting, supply chain management, IT, engineering and customer service processes for GE and other blue chip clients across Europe.

"Our expansion into Romania is key to the value proposition we give to our European customers, including global delivery of services and the highest standards of process quality," said Pramod Bhasin, president of Gecis Global.

Experts, however, say outsourcing firms do need to step up vigilance to mitigate data security lapses.

"If the Indian industry is not shown to be addressing such occurrences on a war footing the battle will become increasingly one-sided," said Raghu Raman, CEO of Mahindra Special Services Group.

"I don't think the quantum of outsourcing will reduce drastically but our ability to climb up the value chain will be severely deterred," he added.

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