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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
