Congruent to hike staff by 900

CHENNAI: Congruent Solutions, a Chennai-based IT products and services company, which started offshore services in the field of retirement plans recently, intends to increase its headcount by 900 in the next three to four years. The company is also on the verge of deploying its flagship product in the US markets shortly.

Flagged off in January 2005, the BPO arm of Congruent presently has eight certified associates that would be scaled up to 500 in the next three years. The company has an overall strength (excluding the BPO arm) of around 80 constituting employees for software development and business support staff. "We intend to increase this to 120 by this year and to over 400 in the next three to four years," informed Congruent Solutions co-founder and president, Bala J Raman.

It may be recalled that Congruent Solutions is the only company outside the US to acquire the 401 K certification to offer offshore development work on retirement benefit plan process. "Our business partner, California-based Associates of Excellence, along with Congruent had jointly conducted training program for these associates to get through the certification tests," explained Raman.

"The whole of the retirement plans market alone in the US stood at $2.6 trillion by 2004 and is slated to be around $2.9 trillion in 2005. In this, nearly $6 billion, the overall internal cost of services, could be the potential area that could be outsourced. And surprisingly, the proposed 10 percent of this outsourcing work would translate into a job creation for nearly 15,000 personnel in India," he further informed.

"We intend to add nearly 200 to 300 in Chennai and to maintain business continuity later we might look out for satellite towns surrounding Tamil Nadu, like Hyderabad and others to make the headcount reach 500, over the next three years," said Raman.

But, not every person can be assigned with this job and BPO's needs to have strong certified professionals to take up the work. The company wants to further continue the web-based training sessions besides the classroom sessions to help associates get through the certification from National Institute of Pension Administrators (NIPA). "This is not some easy call-center kind of job but involves high-end professional service," added Raman.

Congruent that has developed a web-based product for the Third Party Administrator (TPA) is gearing up to sign up its first customer in the next four to six weeks. "With this winning product, the company would make its maiden entry into the US markets. We intend to deploy an aggressive sales strategy to specifically address this niche vertical. We will look for other markets like UK as possible location for our product and services only after an year or so," said Raman.