Aviva to bring 5,000 BPO staff into its fold

Bangalore, Jan 15: The UK-based insurance major Aviva plans to transfer about 5,000 employees of third-party BPO vendors to its own offshore division Aviva Global Services (AGS) in India. The company has so far transferred 1,600 employees from Aviva-24/7 Customer in Bangalore this month, while the rest will be moved during this calendar year.

Aviva has 6,200 employees on the BPO side with its three partners - 24/7 Customer, EXL and WNS. It employs 1,600 BPO executives in Bangalore; 2,600 in Pune; 600 in Chennai; 300 in Colombo and 1,100 in Noida.

The company employs about 1,700 people in the IT side along with vendors TCS, Wipro and CSC. According to Rajnish Virmani, CEO of Aviva Global Services, "The staff in Pune, Bangalore and Colombo will be transferred to the captive unit from the three partners, while operations in Chennai with 24/7 Customer and Noida centre with EXL will still be operated by the partners and ramped up in 2007 and 2008."

The Chennai centre has a seating capacity of 1,400, while the Noida unit still has about 500 unfilled seats. 24/7 Customer handled 26 different processes for Aviva in Bangalore from customer acquisition to customer retention, said S Nagarajan, COO of 24/7 Customer. "We will build up similar number of processes in Chennai now," Mr Virmani said.

For the Chennai operations, roles outsourced would be slightly different, with the inclusion of specialised skills like analytics, acturial, statistical modelling, medical underwriting and legal support, he said.

Aviva had built its offshore operation in India under the BOT (build, operate and transfer) model with the three vendors - EXL, WNS and 24/7 Customer - to enable it to ramp up rapidly and gain the "speed to market".

The transfer of staff from third-party BPO vendors to Aviva is reportedly the first move of its kind in the domestic outsourcing industry.

Nasscom President Kiran Karnik said in a message that several other players have been waiting and watching to see how the BOT model works. Mr Nagarajan said more companies are likely to follow the model.

Sources>