Business Case Studies, Executive Interviews, Sreeram Iyer on Business Process Outsourcing

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Executive Interviews: Interview with Sreeram Iyer on Business Process Outsourcing
January 2006 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary


Sreeram Iyer
CEO, Scope International


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  • Could you tell us briefly about the background of your company (evolution, promoters and business objectives)?
    Scope International is a wholly owned subsidiary of Standard Chartered Bank, UK. The company was incorporated in May 2001.

    One of our early drivers for setting up the hub was cost arbitrage, but our long-termgoal was to use our experience of operating in low cost countries to build scale, create a robust talent pool for the Group, to rationalize operating platforms and to standardize processes with strong risk controls.

    We service all 50-plus countries of the Standard Chartered Group in one way or another through an array of services. We process nearly 75million transactions annually for the Group for a savings of about 80 million USD on an annual basis.

  • Why did the Standard Chartered Bank, UK, choose India and Malaysia for setting up the Shared Services Centers?
    The Group embarked on a detailed study while picking out locations for our Shared Service Centers. Chennai and Kuala Lumpur emerged as number one choices based on the general business environment, staff availability and their skills, work ethics and quality of work, labor regulations, tax benefits, infrastructure costs, accessibility and political stability.

  • What are the major operations that are carried out in the Indian Center and the Malaysian Center?
    Our operations are very diverse and range from wholesale and consumer banking operations to HR support, finance activities, global market operations, software development, maintenance and testing support, and technology support.

    Chennai does not support language dependent processes; those transactions that require knowledge of Chinese are handled out of Kuala Lumpur.

  • There has been a widely reported backlash from the employees of the organization when the organizations outsourced activities to countries like India. Has there been any such backlash in your bank when a decision was made to set up an outsourcing center in India? If yes, how did you handle it?
    The decision to set up a processing hub was a unanimous one taken by the board; it had the buy in of all senior management of the SCB Group. Staffs in jobs that were made redundant were re-skilled for other roles and redeployed wherever possible. So there was really no backlash or other related problems.

  • For all the BPO firms, and especially so for Banking and Financial-Services-Related BPOs, maintaining confidentiality has been a major issue. How is this concern addressed in your organization?
    We adopt several methods; we have dedicated networks for SCB users, which are protected by high-end anti virus software.We adopt international best practices for securing data and preventing data transfer out of the company.

    We adopt all existing industry standards in IT security in terms of passwords and user IDs. We have multiple layers of control and access rights for applications.

    Physical access to the main data center and server roomis closely guarded and strictly controlled – we use biometric access in this section.

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