Friday, August 24, 2007

Indian KPO unit in Argentina

The Indian company CRISIL- IREVNA has opened a KPO ( Knowledege Process Outsourcing) unit in Buenos Aires. This unit does equity research and offers investment research services to the world's leading investment banks and financial institutions. They work with Standard and Poor and other companies.The unit is operational since June 2007.

Crisil is the leader in credit rating business in India and one of the top rated in the world. Crisil acquired IREVNA and later Standard and Poor has acquired stake in Crisil. more at http://www.irevna.com/

The unit in Buenos Aires employs 25 Argentine staff and has plans to expand the strength. It is being run by Mr Chetan Majithia.

I spoke to Chetan this week about his experience. He is there for the last one year. He is happy with the quality of Argentine professionals and the low cost of talents there. Crisil had done market research about other countries and decided to open unit in Argentina, because of the cost advantage and availability of professionals. We are not talking about spanish speaking professionals here. The KPO work is done in English.

Chetan had two problems: getting visa for Argentina (one of his colleagues was given a 15 day single entry visa! this is surprising and shocking. The government of argentina has signed an Agreement with India under which they give three year multi entry visa ) ; secondly the legal procedure for establishment of companies is complicated and time consuming.. as it was in the pre-reform days of india ! Chetan's work permit application is pending for the last four months.
These are, of course, minor and solvable problems.

It is worthwhile for other Indian IT and BPO companies to explore the opportunities for IT, BPO and KPO operations. ICICI from India has already established a BPO in Buenos Aires employing 36o staff... in my 19 July blog story

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am reading with lots of interest the stories published.

Just a few comments to the Chetan´s experience: It should´nt take too long to obtain the work permit/visa. 4 months is definetely too long!

As legal adviser I can agree that the times to establish a company aren´t that short, but compared to some jurisdictions in South America (i.e. Brasil), tmis are shorter and to some extent procedures easier. But there are still many things to improve.

Unknown said...

The time of 4 months to obtain work permit is definitely too long.It should hardly take 2 months.

Priyanka (KPO Professional)

Anonymous said...

There is another KPO firm in Buenos Aires, Axial Analytics, although smaller I know for a fact they work quite well. They have educated analyst and a good management team. You definitely should review them.
Nice blog by the way!

Juliet said...

I have just moved to Argentina and yes believe it or not it can take 4 months to get your visa... I also agree with some of the reasons is setting up in Argentina. There is a large availability of talented professionals here seeking employment, there is a huge foreign population as well as a highly educated foreign population. For this reason and many others, low cost incomes, close proximity to US and similar time zones, many companies are looking to outsourcing to this region. Call centers in particular are popping up everywhere. www.5ca.com is just one of these offering multilingual services.

knowledge process outsourcing India said...

Thanks for sharing the informatioon about KPO unit in Argentina...
Regards,
knowledge process outsourcing