Tiger. Genpact has itself made four acquisitions in the last three years – building specialized capabilities to complete the range of services offered in areas such as SOX compliance, controllership audit, and augmentation of internal audit …
“Things you’d expect either an internal audit team, or a “big four” firm to do. That capability complements our F&A practice,” explains Tiger.
Finally, Genpact foresees a trend of providers acquiring captive shared services, as more and more corporations realize that it makes good business sense for them to concentrate on developing, selling to, and buying from new markets, while letting a third party focus on supporting its non-core needs in that market. Many organizations are able to grow faster and easier in China as a result of such strategies than they would otherwise have been able to grow. Genpact’s takeover of GE Money’s shared services operations in Guatemala City this year is one such example; another is Infosys’s acquisition of Philips’s F&A shared services.
Particularly in today’s economy characterized by a credit crunch, taking costs out, and standardization, management teams are finding themselves thinly stretched. Handing back office operations to experts, and focusing on products, markets and growth, may prove a winning strategy.
Tiger Tyagarajan is executive vice president of Genpact, a former GE unit that manages processes for global companies. Tyagarajan began his career with the Unilever Group in Bombay and later joined Citibank as Vice President, Global Consumer Banking. He joined GE in 1994 as general manager for risk at Countrywide and went on to become CEO for GE Capitalís Global Consumer Finance and Auto Financial Services operations in India.