Broadridge expands BPO services

Broadridge Financial Solutions (India) (BFS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of New York-based Broadridge Financial Solutions Inc, has expanded the scope of its operations to include a full range of financial business process outsourcing (BPO) services, such as back office, middle office, corporate and finance functions.

BFS provides brokerage and securities processing to global investment banks on outsourcing model.

According to BFS (India) managing director V Laxmikanth, the expanded BPO services were mainly aimed at North American and Western European markets, where the large majority of its clients are based.

Broadridge’s Indian arm would manage the expanded BPO business, but its existing expertise here would be leveraged for this and the company would not be looking to recruit new talent, he told reporters on Tuesday.

Explaining the timing of the decision, Laxmikanth said the market was now looking at consolidation.

“Capital market BPO is a critical sector. In this, a lot of Indian BPOs want to become platform BPOs, ie, ones which offer their own technology and provide services on top of that. Broadridge has always been a platform BPO, but with this expansion, it is becoming a general service BPO, offering services whatever be your technology,” he said.

Broadridge would continue to offer services on its proprietary securities processing platform in addition to the new non-platform services, he said, estimating the global financial service BPO industry at $4-8 billion.

The company currently employs 1,100 people in India and 5,000 in the US, of which 100 people from India and 400 from the US would work on the BPO operations.

The disproportion in the staff size was because some of its clients would not want their sensitive financial information to be processed outside the country of origin, he said. Also, there were different categories of data requiring different levels of security, he added.

‘Gloss’ for Indian market
Broadridge also launched its new market connectivity solution 'Gloss' aimed at institutional brokerage firms operating in India. It is a trading system which provides direct connectivity to Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange, in addition to markets in US, Canada, UK, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia.

“Today global clients have investments in several countries but there is no single tool that presents the overall risk profile. People are looking at data aggregation to get a consolidated picture and Gloss would provide that,” Laxmikanth said.