UK FSIs are wary of foreign BPOs

BANGALORE: Although the overall benefit perception of BPO in the financial

services has improved considerably, most of the UK based FSIs (financial

services institutes) are not too keen to outsource to other countries such as

India said Anders Maehre, Senior Analyst, Financial Services Technology &

Outsourcing services, Datamonitor, addressing a session on “Next Generation

BPO”, at the ninth NASSCOM ITES-BPO India strategy summit in Bangalore.

In the past FSIs have outsourced in order to cut costs, but going forward FSI

will increasingly look at vendors to deliver transformation, help create a

global sourcing platform and enable internal focus on core competencies, he

said.

Speaking on Insurance BPOs, he said processing is one of the most frequently

considered areas for BPO. Supplier management is another area of great interest,

drive by the need to improve efficiency of the claims value chain, especially as

profitability in the general insurance sector deteriorates, he said.

According some of the key findings of UK based FSA (Financial Services

Authority), half of UK customers are concerned by offshore call center usage.

The main risk is seen as the difficulty of distance management and gaining a

true operational overview. However, the FSA finding concludes that risks are

most often firm specific and that individual effort and investments can offset

the inherent risks of offshoring.

“The Indian players have barely scratched the surface of the BPO market

opportunity and may be less that 2 per cent of the market share. To retain India

competitiveness and its pre-eminent place, the companies need to look from

global perspective as in benchmark against the global players. However, for it

to happen, the industry needs to address infrastructure issues such as bandwidth

to drive business growth,” said Pawan Vaish, COO, IBM Daksh Business Process

Services and chairperson for the session.

© CyberMedia News