‘Massive growth potential for BPO’
Keshav Murugesh, Chief Executive Officer of Mumbai back-office company WNS Global Services, came on board last February after a global search of almost a year. In a chat with eWorld, Murugesh talks of the way forward for the NYSE-listed company. Excerpts:
Two of our biggest verticals — travel and insurance — are still under stress. How are you going about these businesses?
I agree that these two businesses have been under stress for quite some time now. However, one has the comfort that these companies have survived the worst and hence they will start looking at additional cost savings themes. We are actually having good quality discussions with a number of players in these industries.
Have these discussions converted into revenues yet? May be not. Will they convert into revenues in the longer term? I am pretty certain they will. We are focused on maintaining our revenue lines with customers and are trying to get a larger share of their wallet on the strength of our relationship.
Given that a lot of countries in continental Europe are now more open to offshoring than ever before, how are you positioning yourself to ride this opportunity?
As we make a bigger charge into some of these countries in Europe, we believe the availability of French and German speaking capabilities is going to become an obvious requirement. Before these companies resort to total offshoring, the first priority would be to send work to a near-shore facility so that they can meet and interact with people who speak the same language and culture before moving it completely to an offshore destination such as India. We already have low-cost delivery centres in Costa Rica and Romania. If we want to get deeper into France we will need to create even more near-shore centres for French speaking capabilities. One could ideally look at Egypt, Morocco or Mauritius from a delivery perspective. We will take a call on this at the end of the strategic planning exercise that we have embarked on.
A lot of players keep talking about how an integrated IT-BPO approach is the way to crack key customer accounts. Since you are a pure-play BPO company, do you think it could be a deterrent in the long run?
I know a lot of players talk about an integrated IT-BPO kind of approach but I am still struggling to find many client organisations where decisions related to both are taken by the same set of people. The decision makers on the IT side and the BPO side are completely different. On the IT side, it is the Chief Information Officer and his or her team who deal with vendors. On the BPO side, we deal with the CFOs and CEOs of companies. On the basis of an existing client relationship, you could be able to get a sales meeting. However, when you start competing, you realise that the final list of shortlisted players is very different from the total number of players who had evinced interest.
I do not see the lack of an independent capability as a deterrent at this stage. One must realise that of the $220-billion market for BPO, only $30 billion or so has been penetrated till now. Thus, the headroom for growth in pure-play BPO is massive which explains why a lot of the IT companies have been expanding in this space.
One of WNS’ key stakeholders, Warburg Pincus was in the news last year for its interest in selling out of the company. Now, is that not a distraction for the company and its new CEO?
I can assure you there is no distraction of any stakeholder backing out. Every stakeholder is completely focused on the long term growth of this company. Whatever process they (Warburg Pincus) may have initiated last year is over and done with. They are completely focused on growth and are backing me and my team to the hilt. The job of my management here is to make WNS such an exciting business that it becomes unaffordable for anybody to be able to buy this company.
