Karvy Global  | Newsroom

JANUARY 2008

Karvy Outsourcing Unit Aims to Help Clients Grow

January 28, 2008 By Savita Iyer, Securities Industry News

After building up its Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) and knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) businesses, Hyderabad-based Karvy Global Services (KGS) is focused on forging stronger relationships with its clients in the U.S. and Canada and cultivating new ones.

"The management of Karvy, our parent company, was very keen to have the leader of KGS sitting in the U.S. to be closer to our clients," says Atul Sood, Karvy Global Services' recently appointed, New York-based president. "One of the main reasons I have come on board is to deepen relationships with existing clients and drive value for them beyond their day-to-day requirements."

Sood, who joined Karvy in July from Bangalore-based IT services company Mphasis, where since January 2005 he was head of the North American solutions division in New York, says he is "all about long-term relationships." Not only will KGS continue to produce high-quality work in a cost-effective manner, according to Sood, but it will also leverage its capabilities to offer clients an extensive set of solutions to help them expand.

"Many of our clients--particularly financial services companies--are looking toward India as the U.S. slows down," Sood explains. "We can serve as a real conduit for them, in terms of providing them with what they need for their growth plans, because of the breadth and depth we have in India. They have tried and tested us out; they know we can provide a quick turnaround and add value."

Such service, Sood says, will help establish the kinds of relationships that KGS needs for future growth. "We are not that huge yet, but we're fine-tuning our offerings so that we're ready to scale new heights," he says. "There will be continued retrenchment in the banking and financial services industry and more work going to India, so I see a continued opportunity for us to grow."

KGS was launched by financial services and accounting company Karvy in 2005, with ARthur Flew, a former Citigroup executive and the founder of Mphasis, which was acquired in 2006 by Electronic Data Systems Corp. of Plano, Texas, as chief executive. Flew, who had been based in Hyderabad, retired early last year and Kris Sakotai, head of Karvy Global's KPO business, left the company in November.

Sood began his career as an investment banker in the technology sector before joining the business development team of Trilogy, an Austin, Texas-based technology services provider with an office in Bangalore. Gaurav Agrawal, a sales manager at Alcatel-Lucent Technologies who has also worked at Wipro Technologies, replaced Sakotai.

Bridging the BPO, KPO Gap

KGS's 100 employees in Hyderabad will continue to do the BPO and KPO work that makes up the company's core business. But Sood says he believes it is important to minimize the traditional gap between BPO and KPO, to provide more holistic and refined solutions to clients.

"We're starting to apply MBA-trained KPO guys to BPO projects and breaking down the barriers between low-end work and high-end work because we believe we can get more out of it that way and so can our clients," he says. It is an approach that also appeals to employees, "who, after all, are the bread and butter of a company."

Indeed, the high attrition rates among Indian outsourcing companies are due largely to employee boredom, Sood contends. Workers would like to do more and be in charge of more, he says, and allowing them the opportunity to grow in their work is vital. "As we foster growth, we are also trying to keep people on board and create our next level of managers."

Sood is also hoping to raise the bar for quality of work. While KGS is well known for both its run-off-the-mill BPO work and the higher-level market and equity research functions it performs for various companies, there is always room for improvement, he says, adding that this applies to all Indian companies offering outsourcing to the West.

"The presentation of data is critical for the financial services industry and the demands of the international market still exceed the quality of the average product coming out of India," Sood says. "While India still leads other nations that are in the KPO business because of the sheer number of talented individuals, there still needs to be a greater focus on editing and presentation."