Analysis of South Africa as a BPO Delivery Location - Business Trust

The first of these points is the more obvious given the maturity of the banking and insurance sectors inSouth Africa. However, even in financial services, South Africa is typically being used for more complexprocessing tasks, requiring high levels of expertise and frequently high levels of management interaction.For example, CSC uses South Africa as a staging post for the roll-out of life BPO services to its Indianoperations in support of its US life BPO clients and to handle complex parts of the value chain.Similarly both Old Mutual and Discovery are seeking to build global financial services shared servicecentres in South Africa, with both new financial services product development and processing beingconcentrated in South Africa.Perhaps more surprising is the role of South Africa in supporting Continental Europe, with forexample Old Mutual supporting its German business out of South Africa and Shell providing back-officeshared services in support of its Benelux, French, and Canadian businesses from South Africa.In both cases, the companies found South Africa to be a more suitable source of Dutch and Germanlanguage expertise combined with accounting and financial services skills than Europe. Overall, thecapability to support Continental European operations in languages such as Dutch, German andFrench out of Cape Town is broadly comparable to, or better than, that out of more traditional EasternEuropean locations such as Krakow, and potentially offers higher value-for-money.Overall NelsonHall estimates that at present approximately 50% of financial industry-specific andback-offices services delivered from South Africa are English language based with the remaining 50%being German, Dutch, and French-based. While it is likely that the proportion of English-language withinthis mix will increase as the industry scales, South Africa remains a viable consideration for ContinentalEuropean back-office services within a company’s global delivery network.18International Services Delivered and WhyExamples of services delivered from South Africa in support of financial industry-specific services andback-office services are shown in Exhibit IV-1.Exhibit IV-1Industry-Specific and Back-Office Services Delivered from South African by SectorSectorEnergyWealthLife insuranceProfile of Services SupportedOrder taking and customer serviceCredit operationsCoordinating product scheduling and delivery with major clientsInvestment new business supportCustomer data managementMoney collectionNew business capturePremium collectionPolicy administrationClaims processingCommissions handlingIn general, SouthAfrica remainssuited to the morecomplex handlingof processes andcustomers withinthese domains,rather than the morebasic transactionprocessing, which isincreasingly beingautomated.