Keane to foray into RPO industry

Keane Inc, a business process and IT services firm, will shortly be testing its mettle in the recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) industry.

The Hyderabad centre of the $955.9-million company will be foraying into this segment.

Speaking to Business Standard, Sukant Srivastava, managing director of Keane India Limited, said, "Our global resourcing team led by Kalyan Mahalingam is based in Hyderabad and we have been doing in-house RPO globally for Keane from here. Providing RPO services for third-parties seems to be a logical extension to this."

The RPO industry covers areas like advertising for jobs, matching job profile with the candidate's profile, screening, reference checks, fixing interviews, placement and even training and orientation. The industry is estimated to grow to $24 billion by 2008.

The Hyderabad centre of Keane, employing 968 people, has so far been handling IT services and will now foray into business process outsourcing (BPO) services as well.

At present, Keane's BPO operations are handled out of Gurgaon, via Keane Worldzen, which caters to claims processing, annuity processing, utilisation management and collection and recovery. The ratio between data and voice component is 80:20.

Meanwhile, the company is also eyeing the Indian smart card-based micro payment system market.

"India is likely to be a big market for smart card-based micro payment system in the near future and we are betting big on this. We are already in talks with a few potential customers," Srivastava said. A smart card is a plastic card containing a chip that can store electronic money.

At present, the Hyderabad centre of Keane is already handling a project on the aforesaid lines for the state government of Victoria, Australia. The $367-million deal involves delivery of a public transit ticketing system for the state of Victoria.

The micro payment smart card technology ticketing system is being developed to support Victoria's multi-modal network of 270 railway stations, 480 trams and 1,650 buses servicing more than 410 million journeys each year.

So in this case, when passengers scan their cards at the turnstile or while boarding a tram or a bus, there is automatic deduction of the cost of the ride.

Keane has also applied for five acres of land in Andhra Pradesh to set up a campus. The company plans to increase its headcount in India to more than 10,000 in the next 3-5 years from around 2,950 at present.