Icra launches Brickwork, an analytics service

Icra, the credit rating agency, and B2K, a BPO start-up, launched "Brickwork", an investment research analysis service across multiple domains aimed at the market in developed economics like the US, Europe and Australia for outsourced financial analysis.

P K Choudhury, managing director of Icra, and Vivek Kulkarni, chairman and CEO of B2K, explained that while leading western financial firms like Goldman Sachs had their captive research and analysis units in India, Brickwork would serve those who were willing to outsource such work to third parties.

Brickwork will electronically deliver analytical services and also provide a round the clock knowledge centre. It will draw on Icra's domain knowledge in the field of business and financial analysis and B2K's IT infrastructure and also business analytics strengths.

The Brickwork service will cover investment research, financial research, finance and accounting services and risk assessment. Both the companies will market the service initially in the US and it will be jointly delivered by staff of both the firms.

Around 30 analysts will be deployed by the two companies, with infrastructure to take the headcount upto 70. The cooperation will be on the basis of an MoU between the two companies and no separate firm is being constituted for the purpose.

The USP of the Icra-B2K joint endeavour was Indian analytical capabilities which were both of a high quality and came with a cost advantage.

Explaining the extent to which such back office work was already being done out of India, Choudhury said that a good part of the presentations made by McKinsey consultants all over the world was extensively prepared by the organisation's captive Indian knowledge centre.

The outsourced research opportunity was on the rise in the US because of the obligation by financial firms under the Sarbanes Oxley Act to assess and mitigate risk and put a Chinese wall between broking operations and financial analysis, Kulkarni said.

There was a market for affordable research on little known listed companies as most analysts focused only on top companies.