Musharraf encourages call centre and business processes outsourcing on WorldBridge Connect pattern

A dinner was hosted by the United States Chamber of Commerce and the US-Pakistan Business Council in the honour of President General Pervez Musharraf, in New York City, during his visit to the US to participate in the UN General Assembly. At the reception, the President was introduced to Gurujot Singh Khalsa, Chief Executive of WorldBridge Connect.
Khalsa and his team are in the process of setting up a 500-seat call centre in Lahore that would employ more than 1,500 people. WorldBridge Connect will provide offshore call centre and back office business processing services to Fortune 500 US corporations thus would enable such companies to improve quality while minimising costs.
In this regard, United Bank Limited ("UBL") has been mandated as Financial Advisor and Lead Arranger for arranging the required financing, in two rounds. The first round of financing has been raised by UBL from reputable institutions like UBL, Rupali Group, First Dawood Investment Bank and Peabody Associates.
Khalsa and his team were among the pioneers in 1990 to set up the first offshore back office business processes operation for major US companies in India, which played an instrumental role towards the boom of the call centre and business processing outsourcing services in India.
He also started HealthScribe, Inc, today the 3rd largest medical transcription company in the $10 billion medical transcription industry.
The team sold out most of its interest in this Company to a group of private equity funds in 1998.
In 1998, Khalsa started one of the first offshore outsourcing call centre in India, servicing major US corporations, by the name of FirstRing, Inc. Anchor customers for this Company were American Express, Morgan Stanley Dean Whittier, and Providian Financial. He sold FirstRing in 2001 to ICICI, the second largest banking group in India.
Khalsa discussed with the President the future plans of WorldBridge Connect in Pakistan and how the company's activities would benefit both the US and Pakistan.
This would be the first call centre to be set up by a US investor in Pakistan, which would provide services to Fortune 500 companies. This venture can provide the required impetus for the growth of the call centre industry in Pakistan by providing a model for replication as it has in India.
Key components are human resource training and employment opportunities along with technology transfer in state of the art customer service and business process practices.
US companies are moving quickly to outsource and offshore much of their back office business processes and call centre operations because of the substantial cost advantage.
In order to ensure that their location risk is minimised, they are looking for more than one alternative for outsourcing. South Africa and Pakistan are two such alternatives after India.
Others are the Philippines, the Caribbean, and Ireland. Right now about 70 percent of the business go to India, 20 percent to the Philippines, and 10 percent to others.
This venture is likely to open future avenues for attracting foreign investment by providing outsourcing opportunities to Fortune 500 companies.
The President, intrigued by the success that Khalsa had brought to India as a pioneer in the call centre and business processes outsourcing services, said he was eager to see the same in Pakistan and offered full support of the Government.