30 Minute Interview

“India is a fantastic centre for finance and accounting”

David Leigh, Commercial & Strategy Director, Xansa spoke to Dominic K on the developments in the Indian BPO market particularly in non voice processes for finance, accounting and payroll.

David Leigh

Tell us about Xansa and its vertical of expertise?

We almost have 60 percent of our headcount here in India with about five thousand of our nine thousand global employees here. Our clients are almost all headquartered in the UK with operations around the world.

Our operations started around the mid sixties. We started with management and development of applications then, over time, became a services based company. For the last four or five years we are more into business process outsourcing. As of today about 25 percent of our revenue comes from the business process outsourcing model, about 60-70 percent from managed services while about eight percent comes from recruitment. We do about $800 million in revenue.

Vertically we are 25 percent public sector (Government) and 75 percent private sector. Within the private sector the big ones are financial services which predominantly include retail banking and insurance along with retail, logistics, and telecom. We do not have anything in manufacturing or pharmacy. To be honest most of the services that we sell are horizontal in nature.

What is the current statues of Finance & Accounting outsourcing in India?

We have about five thousand people and a vast majority of them are in delivery. They are located in Noida, Chennai, Pune and Gurgaon. The delivery services include IT services and application work.

What kind of growth do you expect in this industry?

If you measure the service provider market based on volume of transactions and processes then we are number one in Europe and number two in the world. India is a fantastic centre for finance and accounting. Finance includes payroll as well. These are simple processes to outsource and we look forward to add more value.

In Chennai we have about a thousand people handling finance and accounting related processes. The biggest deal in Europe last year was the deal we won for the BBC. We won that in December for processes in finance and payroll, about a 45 million pound contract over ten years. Most of this will be delivered out of India.

There is tremendous growth. Whether the same amount of growth will sustain is a different question. We have grown our Indian operation by about 35 percent in the last twelve months. The next 35 percent is comparatively harder than the previous one as is always the case.

The other factor being that as off shoring becomes more attractive to private sector companies whether in Europe or the UK market, there tends to be a dilution somewhere in revenue because the clients tends to be charged less making it harder to grow revenues.