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Reuters, the financial data services company, is to outsource to India value-added research supporting its data on leading businesses, underscoring a rising segment of India's growing business process outsourcing (BPO) sector.
The agreement deepens Reuters' presence in India, where a year ago it opened a financial data analysis centre employing 1,000 local staff, including some experimenting with the delivery of business news.
John Curran, executive vice-president for research and asset management at Reuters in London, said the agreement with Copal Partners, a knowledge process outsourcing company in New Delhi, was an example of "smart sourcing".
He said the deal combined "Copal's customised financial research and analytics with Reuters' database technology".
Copal would gain access to Reuters' data on global companies and "apply our modelling skills to add to the data value chain", said Rishi Khosla, chief executive.
Copal's young employees cost considerably less to employ than junior bankers and lawyers in the US and UK, whose background research on acquisitions or para-legal work is increasingly being performed remotely in India.
The trend to send offshore high-cost back-office tasks such as writing equity reports and designing valuation models has gained in popularity alongside traditional BPO areas such as call enquiries about credit cards bills.
Copal says it has doubled staffing in the past six months and plans another 40 per cent expansion in recruitment by December to accommodate the extra research work from the Reuters alliance.
Growth at India's leading independently owned KPO companies -- Evalueserve in New Delhi and Office Tiger in Chennai -- reflects this dynamism.
Three months ago, Evalueserve expanded into China, where it plans to target Japan and Korea as well as China; Office Tiger had also expanded via acquisitions.
In a report last year, Nasscom and Evalueserve said the global KPO market would grow from $1.2bn to $17bn by 2010, covering "knowledge-based" activities such as data search, management services, financial and legal due diligence, which depend on business, rather than process expertise.
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