for Europe may be served out of North Africa in the near future – Tunisia and Morocco for French, for example.”
Such resource strategies cover the needs of global customers, with the advantage of staying ahead of the curve on wages, inflation, attrition, and retention.
Process specialization
Given significant differences in labor markets what should the selection process look like? In other words: Where in the world should you source your process expertise? Genpact’s view, based on 11+ years of
experience is that – barring some exceptions – most markets can offer the full spectrum of services.
“The reality is that there is great raw material available in all these locations,” says Tiger, “so when you look at process capability, you are almost location agnostic.” Many of these markets are only now emerging, or even underdeveloped, so they are not familiar with financial services common to more developed economies.
“When we started in India, only a few understood how a mortgage was done,” explains Tiger. “so we needed to train them. Similarly, many English speakers in India and elsewhere learned language from a translation perspective – not as an IT specialist. That is changing now.”
However, there are exceptions to every rule. As you move to higher value added processes, requiring judgment, decision making and data modeling (e.g., for financial services) people need to be able to migrate from transaction processing to more complex work. This means you need staff with strong skills in statistics and maths. India is able to offer this, as is China – but the latter will need a few more years to mature. When you look at transactional work, any location will work. Call centers,