October - 2002 issue > Business

OCTOBER 2000: THE HEADS OF HDFC (formerly Housing Development and Finance Corporation), India's housing mortgage major, and Tata Consulting Services (TCS) came together in a joint venture to grab a share of the exploding call center and back-office processing business. They called it Intelenet Global Services Ltd, with HDFC and TCS holding 45 percent share each, and the remaining 10 percent reserved for employee stock options.

Like most other joint ventures, Intelenet was formed to leverage each other's strengths. While HDFC would provide domain expertise in customer relations and back office processing in the banking, finance, and insurance business, TCS would provide the IT and marketing support through its large workforce across the globe.

“TCS brings the technology and process experience and HDFC brings the infrastructure experience,” says Arup Gupta, CEO of TCS's American operations.

TCS has several international banking and finance groups on its client list. HDFC, in turn, is associated with Standard Life Assurance and Chase Manhattan. The joint venture is strategically aimed at targeting the existing customers for back office activities.

Two years later, this strategy seems to be working. In January of this year, Intelenet inked a contract with Standard Life Health Care. The contract would bring $1.5 million in business to the joint venture.

“To begin with, we will be providing document indexing and invoice processing services to Standard Life. However, we will extend this to multiple services including call center support,” says Intelenet CEO Sisir Kumar.

“Our existing customers are a good prospect for us to do BPO as we understand their processes. We have established the relationship with them and can prove that we can handle their business processes,” says Gupta.

Intelenet is not banking on the existing client network alone. Recently, it won a contract from the Illinois-based Household Corporation, which was not a customer of HDFC or TCS. Household provides consumer loan, credit card, auto finance, and credit insurance products in the US, United Kingdom, and Canada. TCS America and Intelenet will provide Household with 100 agents to enable collections from delinquent credit card customers. Going forward, Intelenet will be providing additional services, which include customer acquisition, customer service, telemarketing, analytical, and back-office processes.

“Since we already have a relationship with our existing customers, we will be straightaway getting into handling their mission-critical processes,” says Gupta. He explains that TCS understands the processes of his customers either by doing IT application or strategic consulting. “For non-customers like Household with whom we have no IT relation today, we start with call center. Typically it takes about 12 months to go into their core processes. Once we get into handling the core processes, we will bid for IT outsourcing as well,” says Gupta.

“The venture has been operational for less than 12 months. Apart from Household and Standard Life, we have recently signed up with five to six big financial institutions. TCS has a good understanding with 200 of the Fortune 500 companies. We are in talks with them for BPO,” says Gupta.