Even as firms take a relook at their expansion strategy, Nasdaq listed Euronet is setting up its global development centre in India. The centre in Pune will start with 50 people and will grow to 150 people in a couple of years. Euronet provides services and solutions for electronic payment, ATMs and also has presence in card outsourcing.
“The strategy to have a global development centre in India is part of our efforts to simplify our infrastructure and bring in cost efficiency. The Pune centre will be operational in the second quarter of 2009. The first 50 people will move from our Mumbai office,” said Kevin J Caponecchi, President Euronet Worldwide. However, the company did not provide details on the cost efficiencies it will achieve due to this.
The centre will be responsible for software development, IT services and operations of the company’s global operations. The Pune centre will work in collaboration with other centres in other geographies like Budapest, Serbia, US among others. “Over a period of time the India centre will replace some of the other centres. But at this point of time we would not like to comment on those aspects. But our new focus will be in ‘India for world’,” added Caponecchi.
Moreover by the end of this year, India will also serve as a processing centre for close to 20 countries that Euronet has presence in. Currently, India serves as a processing for seven countries. “India earlier was supporting just Indian operations which we extended to Asia and Europe and now we will take this to the overall Euronet,” added Caponecchi. However, this transfer of work need not necessarily mean an increase in headcount in India.
Euronet has a global payment network— including 10,218 ATMs and approximately 54,000 electronic financial transactions (EFTs) point of sale (PoS) terminals which are under management in 24 countries. The company also has portfolio in outsourced debit and credit card services, card software solutions and prepaid processing network.
The company also believes that India will be growing market. “We manage close to 3,800 ATMs in India and have relationship with 14 banks over the past sis years of our operations in India. Our transaction in the Cashnet (shared ATM network) segment are growing by 25 per cent every quarter. We feel that prepaid segment is the next phase of growth in India,” said Anthony Grandidge, Senior vice -president, managing director- Asia Pacific.
