Anando Mukherji To Head Icici Bpo Wing

ICICI is all set to float a new company under its fold for the emerging business process outsourcing (BPO) business. It will be headed by Anando Mukherji, who formerly returned to the company today after a two-year stint at Dabhol Power Company (DPC) and BPL as their chief financial officer.

Mukherji left ICICI in January 1999. At that time he was a senior general manager in charge of infrastructure projects. According to sources, ICICI is seeing huge opportunities in the BPO business, which has a massive market in the US. "It has been doing a bit of this work through ICICI Infotech, but entirely for the group. The floatation of the new outfit will help ICICI to tap the vast potential of the segment," sources said.

Mukherji said: "More and more companies have been focussing on their core businesses with greater emphasis on the front-end client delivery. The BPO business can play a major role to fill in the void. In India we have already seen the first level of BPOs in call centres."

Mukherji sees a vast potential for the BPO business in India by virtue of its location (less than 12 hour flight from the US) and large English-speaking population.

ICICI is targetting the financial services segment for the BPO business and feels it can be as large a segment as the IT sector. ICICI has a fairly big back-office processing centre and the relevant domain knowledge to make forays into the BPO business.

Mukherji's job will be to look outward and shift focus from meeting group requirements to the outside corporate world.