TransWorks to open Bangalore centre

BANGALORE: Privately-held TransWorks, one of the smaller players in India's crowded back-office services industry, aims to more than double its staff by next March as it wins more business from global firms stepping up outsourcing.

"The pilot phase for several of our clients is now over and most of them are in a ramp-up mode," Prakash Gurbaxani, chief executive officer at TransWorks, told Reuters. The new unit will house 400 seats. TransWorks already runs a 400-seat facility in Mumbai and expanded into Bangalore with a similar capacity centre that kicked off operations in January.

Venture capital firm ChrysCapital, with an investment of about $10 million, owns 70 percent in the three-year-old firm. "With our business growing, we hope to expand our staff to a maximum of 2,000 by next March from about 900," Gurbaxani said.

Global giants are increasingly tapping India's army of low-cost English-speaking graduates and engineers to provide remote back-office services including call centres and billing activities to cut costs in a stubborn economic slowdown. General Electric, Dell Computer and AOL Time-Warner are among the large global companies which have already set up huge back-office and customer service units in India.

"We are also beginning to handle mortgage processing and other non-voice based services for a few firms," Gurbaxani said. TransWorks competes with bigger players such as Wipro Spectramind, part of India's No 3 software services exporter Wipro, MsourcE which is part of software firm MphasiS BFL, and privately-held Daksh eServices.

© Reuters