FIC sets up research teams in Hyd, B'lore

To work on high-end tech to help the company capture data from images

First Indian Corporation Private Limited (FIC), a member of The First American family of companies, has set up research teams at its centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

These teams will work on high-end technology to help the company capture data from images. This is the first time that any of The First American family of companies has set up in-house research teams for this purpose. A Fortune 500 company with 2,000 offices worldwide, First American earned revenues of $8.1 billion in 2005.

Speaking to Business Standard, Anoop Hegde, country manager, First Indian Corporation Private Limited, said, "Around 20 people at our centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad are involved in research on developing technology that can enable us to capture data from images. At present, we collect data from images manually."

First Indian Corporation provides specialised services in software and business process outsourcing segment for real estate, credit and title insurance industry.

This involves handling a large number of images of documents which may even be as old as 30-40 years.

"On such documents, there is the problem of clarity of data. Besides, there is no static position for important information on such documents. So if on one document the name of the property owner is at the top of the page, on the other it may be at the bottom. Such issues make manual capturing of data from images difficult. We are, therefore, working on developing technology that can help us capture data easily from such images," Hegde said.

Hegde expects some development to happen on this front within a year's time. "We are partnering with research organisations in India for development of this technology. This technology will have the potential to be patented and we may even market this among third parties in future," he added. This is the first time that FIC is working on intellectual property development.

FIC will also be looking at extending support services to The First American family of companies in Australia and Canada this year. So far, it has been providing services only to the American entity. FIC is also looking at developing a customer base in India and is "not averse to providing analytical services like finding the risk propensity of loans to mortgage companies in India."

The company employs 2,200 people evenly spread across Hyderabad and Bangalore. It is looking at expanding to a third city like Mangalore, Mysore and Chennai and may even set up a campus in Hyderabad. FIC plans to increase its people strength to 4,000 by December 2006.