SSP to develop India center as knowledge hub

NEW DELHI, INDIA: SSP, a global IT solution provider in insurance and financial service domain, is looking for developing India as a knowledge hub for the company and migrate more work year-on-year from its other development centres to India.

“Recent economic recession in most part of the world have exerted pressure on margins of the company and margins in insurance sector is very less. Large insurance companies around the world are looking at efficiency in their services. Our products allow them in gaining efficiency. We give them additional advantage by having Indian centre where we develop quality product at comparatively very low price,” said Laurence Walker, Global CEO, SSP in an interaction with CIOL.

Indian product development centre of SSP contributes over 50 per cent of its total work done to develop insurance products and 40 per cent in the development of broking system for its global client.

Walker mentioned that SSP in continuously migrating work from the company's other product development center to India and expects that product development work for both the business segment of the company will increase by 170 per cent in two to three years.

“We are constantly pushing to increase our work in India and expect to increase development work to 170 per cent from current levels,” said Walker.

Walker mentioned that SSP is not just bullish to migrate work from other centers to India for just saving cost of development but the company has found large number of young resource availability in India with low attrition rate and better understanding of new-age technology.

“We have workforce of around 120 people in India but we are developing domain expertise here. SSP is getting engaged in various parts of the world and we are developing expertise here to deploy products developed here across the globe. Insurance business is no longer a territory-specific issue,” added Walker.

Walker also mentioned that the company has plans to increase headcount in its India center from 120 to 500 people in the next two to three years as per the need of the company’s business requirement.

“We have doubled our business every three years in all measures. In 2002, we were 150 people globally and now we are 750 people. We had revenues of $15 million and now it is between $75 to $85 million. We are confident that we will double our business in the next three years and increase our headcount in India. The reasonable number will be between 400 to 500 people in India in the next two to three years,” said Walker.

Walker mentioned that SSP in not looking at India as a major market for the company but its India center will create maximum number of intellectual property rights (IPR) in the coming days. SSP is also developing partnership with Indian companies for product development. Recently SSP outsourced migration of one its insurance product from VB based to VB.net based to NIIT Technologies.