“DID YOU SAY INDIA…OR INDIANA?” ASKED A TOP executive at Nationwide, three years ago, when Sushmita Goyal, Chief Strategy Officer was presenting her case to the Management Team to outsource business processes to India. “It’s challenging to manage work being done in our backyard, how do you imagine getting it done 20,000 miles away?”

While the proposal was not approved at that time, the concept was too good to ignore. But Goyal kept it alive, knowing it was the right thing to do. “The fact that Indian vendors are providing world class service at a significant decrease in cost and a significant increase in quality, was too compelling. A company like Nationwide had to leverage the opportunity. It’s a total solution: as a means to optimize our investments, exceed customers expectations in service excellence and offer value-added services; all necessary for us to gain competitive advantage and differentiation,” says Goyal.

The economic slowdown has forced Nationwide to think of ways in which it could meet its financial targets and also increase its earnings per share. With this realization and re-evaluation, it is now up to Goyal to deliver. She is again on the path to analyze what processes are most “offshorable” to be outsourced and is developing necessary strategies to migrate them. Goyal is being conservative. She believes in testing with a pilot and in using a more phased-in approach, where she looks at outsourcing the low-risk processes first. She states, “Offshoring such processes that are true-back offices—more heads-down, manually intensive and more seamless initiallys—will provide a solid proof of concept to the organization. While you may not experience the highest in expense savings, starting with the low-hanging fruit makes sense and once the benefits of enhanced quality and productivity are realized in tandem with the cost savings, management themselves will be asking “what are you sending over next?”

Another major step within the back-office migration strategy is to choose the right vendor. Three years ago, Goyal wasn’t sure of what processes could be executed out of India. “We met a number of third-party Indian vendors who had varying levels of experience with financial services companies. At that time, most outsourcers were still focused on the IT sector. Reviewing the landscape now, I am shocked at how much expertise has been gained and what tremendous insight these vendors have into providing financial services processing offshore.”

“We were also impressed with the cutting-edge facility that a Delhi-based vendor had and the amazing employee talent pool they had working for them. When his team came to Nationwide to perform an in-depth analysis for us, they caught details and surfaced efficiencies on our own processes that we didn’t even know about! In fact, we were so impressed with this vendor three years ago, that we made a recommendation to buy them out!” says Goyal.

“Processes such as indexing, new business application, error correction, change of address, account reconciliation and various others are prime candidates for outsourcing. Call center work including customer calls regarding issue resolution, account balance, transactions and so on has also been an extremely popular trend within outsourcing, even more so than the true BPO work,” she says.

Goyal adds, “With BPO, the vendor is able to apply full focus, time and expertise on these processes as their principal and primary business. They apply Six Sigma quality standards, and particularly in India, have access to a vast talent pool of incredibly educated individuals who take this work as a career. Measuring it holistically, you can actually provide superior service to the customer while experiencing tremendous savings in expense. In fact, companies that are utilizing the offshore model not only save in upfront costs, but are actually realizing a decrease in the number of customer complaint calls that have to be taken (as a result of the increase in quality on the BPO side).

“The economic, regulatory and competitive landscapes that financial services are facing today are more challenging than the first time when we looked at outsourcing—almost three years ago. Back then we were seeking solutions to very specific challenges, today we are seeking resolution to broader strategic issues,” says Goyal.

Her emphasis on BPO is being heard. Three out of the six business units within the Nationwide Enterprise are considering to outsource business processes within their strategic plans. “One cannot survive in today’s market without being creative and leveraging a concept like outsourcing to India…and in my opinion, if you are not already doing it or are not seriously considering it, you are already behind,” reiterates Goyal.