The Hindu Business Line : `BPO clients more wary of info security leaks'

STRENGTHENING its earlier claim that a slew of incidents of information security breach, including the MsourcE case, would dampen the industry's growth rate, a recent Forrester study has found that an overwhelming majority of 31 foreign BPO clients surveyed plan to step up investigation of vendor's security and business processes, to mitigate risks.

When asked how recent incidents of security breach had impacted their offshore BPO plans, the clients surveyed — most of them in the US — admitted to some change or addition in their selection process. They said this would come in the form of additional controls, such as increasing call monitoring ratio, or changing the ratio of call centre agent versus supervisors, or cross examination of databases.

A very small section of the companies surveyed said they were unaffected by the recent events, and would continue with their supplier without any change.

The findings of the report are likely to be released sometime this week. "Of those who talked about taking additional measures, a small percentage said they may move from third party vendors to captive centres," sources said.

The survey by Forrester comes in the wake of recent information security breaches, both onshore and offshore. Last week, MasterCard International said a security breach of credit card payment data had exposed about 40 million cards of all brands to potential fraud in what one analyst termed was the biggest privacy breach ever.

In April, some former employees of MphasiS BFL's BPO operation Msource in Pune were arrested for allegedly stealing over $350,000 from four Citibank customers, sending shock waves through the Indian IT-enabled services sector.

Following the incident, Forrester had said that the case, coupled with high call centre attrition rates, would severely dampen BPO growth rate in the next 18 months. It had warned that call centre BPO growth could drop by as much as 30 per cent.

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