Who do firms offshore their work to?
For straightforward offshore outsourcing there are three main options. There’s the ‘captive’ route where a UK firm will set up its own offshore operation but keep it in-house, as HSBC did in India. Or you can outsource it to one of the traditional services firms such as IBM, EDS or Accenture, which have their own offshore facilities, or one of the Indian firms such as Wipro, Infosys or Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). OK, I think I’ve got that. But what’s this BPO stuff then? That’s business process outsourcing where a complete function such as HR, finance or customer service is outsourced to a company. The market is still in its infancy and the offshore component of that market is even smaller, with India predicted to take just a two per cent share of a global £200bn market. One of the most high profile offshore BPO deals involving a UK company to date has been Thames Water, which signed a BPO contract with Xansa for some of its billing operations to be handled out in India. Seems lik
