The Hindu Business Line : ‘Xchanges’ with India

British BPO firm Xchanging plc, which holds more than 75 per cent stake in the Bangalore-based Cambridge Solutions Ltd, has big plans for the Indian market. Over the next three years, the company hopes to increase its headcount to 12,000 from the present 3,000. In an interview with eWorld, the CEO, David Andrews, spoke about Xchanging’s expansion plans as well as the global economic crisis. Excerpts from the interview:

Are you planning to enter the Indian market?

Absolutely. We are keen to do that. I can’t see how we can be an Anglo-Indian company as we are today without doing business in India. I think it is wrong for us to treat India as a back-office only. We’ve got to have a mature business here. We are speaking to potential customers here. So we are pushing hard.

What are your plans for the Indian market?

We have some software solutions that we want to bring to India. We can run the solutions on behalf of businesses here. We prefer the price per click model. We have a broking solution that is used by 25 per cent of UK brokers. It has just been introduced in the US. We think that will be a success in the Indian market because the Indian market is similar to the UK. The second solution that we have is a micro-banking product suitable for small to mid-sized banks. This comes from Cambridge and we are very keen to push that. We will launch another banking solution.

Are you considering other models as well?

We would also like to enter into partnerships with major Indian corporations. What we are looking for is a large Indian corporation that says ‘my back-office is non-core and how can I be entrepreneurial in making that into a valuable asset.’ We would invest, standardise the platforms, and bring in third party revenue. We are looking for partnerships in particular areas of processing such as billing, HR and claims processing. We have spoken to some enterprises. They are very interested. Hopefully next year we should have done something.

What are your plans to expand Indian operations?

We are 3,000 people in India today at our centres in Bangalore, Shimoga, Delhi and Chennai. We would like to be 12,000 in the next three years. We would like to have 2,000 people in each centre. Probably we will look at two more centres in tier III cities. We quite like the idea of smaller cities.

Are you looking to build new platforms or extend the existing ones?

In banking we see a good opportunity in mortgage processing. So we would like to add a platform in that space. We would like to get into customer billing as well. So that is two new platforms. We have an HR platform in the UK, which we want to internationalise. We want to build a global HR processing hub here in India. We will do that this year. We would also like to expand our HR platform in Germany. The other platform we would like to expand is the procurement platform.

Has there been any change in the way the industry operates?

What we knew as onshore and offshore is dead. What we need is global balancing or the global delivery model. To do that one needs to have everything in a standardised manner globally. Workload has to move backwards and forwards rather than certain workloads moving permanently. Our customers in the US and Australia like our idea of global balancing rather than straight offshoring. We have been doing it in Delhi for some time and we have started doing it in Bangalore.

shamik@thehindu.co.in

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