The Hindu Business Line : Polaris BPO arm to be more than call centre

OPTIMUS Outsourcing Company Ltd, the business process outsourcing arm of Polaris Software Labs, will be a credit card transaction business unit rather than just a call centre.

Meanwhile, as part of vendor rationalisation, Polaris has reduced sub-contractors of OrbiTech to 6-7 from about 30 a year back.

This follows the merger between Polaris and OrbiTech Solutions.

This would save close to Rs 15 crore a year for Polaris, the company's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mr Arun Jain, told Business Line.

OrbiTech used to spend Rs 3-3.5 crore a month on sub-contractors.

Now the figure is about Rs 1.2 crore.

"The rationalisation would also lead to better workforce utilisation," he said.

According to Mr Jain, Optimus would soon offer Orbi One that would help banks with customer acquisition, card issuance, billing and settlement on a rental model.

Citibank has been using Orbi One for the last 12 years.

Based on the business plan, last month Polaris roped in Ms Uma Ratnam Krishnan, Head of Retail Branch Banking and Credit Cards Business at HDFC Bank, as Chief Operating Officer for Optimus.

She is preparing to launch Orbi One in India.

"One major difference of opinion with Mr Harpal Singh, who earlier headed Optimus, was that he wanted the BPO arm to be in the call centre arena, while I wanted it to be in transactional business," Mr Jain said.

"We are tuned to the outside market, not looking at India."

On post-merger issues, he said that the April-June quarter was a turbulent time for Polaris, with a number of employees leaving the organisation.

For every 100 employees, Polaris saw about 15 leave during the quarter, a figure he said the company had anticipated.

That number dropped to about 12 during the next quarter, he added.

On ramping up the joint venture with AIG, the insurance major, Mr Jain said that it has been stable with about 250 persons.

The original plan was to ramp up the joint venture to about 1,000 employees in four years of operations.

However, there is now a delay of about a year.

During the quarter ended September, about 60 employees from the Polaris payroll were transferred to the AIG joint venture.

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