Kenya should capitalise on the opportunities that are bound to be created following the ongoing economic crisis in the developed world to grow its Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry. NetApp Area Director for Middle East, Africa and Pakistan Martyn Molnar said with the debt stricken Europe and with America trying to recover from the global financial crisis, many companies will be looking to outsource their businesses as a way of cutting their costs.

“There are several challenges facing each of those individual countries which are forcing them to embark on the toughest austerity packages. So you are going to see a move towards outsourcing large portions of their business,” he said.
 
Kenya which is touted as one of the strongest African economies will be a likely beneficiary due to its many advantages including a rising middle class, educated workforce and increased bandwidth. The country also has a big talent pool which has seen many call centres established and set the stage for Kenya to market itself as an outsourcing destination. (more…)

Top back office services provider Genpact has partnered with IT firm Mastek to jointly offer solutions for the insurance industry in the first such alliance in the Indian outsourcing industry. The partnership will be for the US market from where Genpact gets a majority of its revenues. Genpact will leverage Mastek’s IT skills and knowledge in the insurance industry, while Mastek will benefit from the BPO firm’s reach in the US market.

“We plan to outline our joint go-to-market strategy to analysts very soon. We believe the proposition will be of mutual value to both of us and to customers,” said Mastek CMD, Sudhakar Ram. The US insurance industry is around 5-7 times of the UK insurance industry and the potential opportunity to grow revenues is proportionate, Mr Ram added. Mastek has chosen to stay away from BPO services even as most IT companies have started offering it. It earns over 50% of its revenues from Europe, primarily UK.

Genpact and Mastek will offer joint information technology and business process management solutions to large and mid-size insurance carriers and develop platform-based solutions for policy services, billing, claims, distribution management, and new business and underwriting. A platform is a standardised offering that allows processing of many transactions with minimum manual processing. It allows service providers to price based on transactions instead of number of people thus helping to break people-dependence on revenues. Source