AGENTS OF CHANGE: RAMAN ROY

Raman Roy is regarded as the pioneer of India's Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and IT enabled services industry. He is credited with setting up India’s first offshore service centre for American Express. He was instrumental in building the country's stature as the locale for remote processing, delivering world-class solutions and services.

During his career he was responsible for establishing the Indian operations for the two global diversified financial services companies, namely American Express (AmEx) followed by General Electric Capital Corporation (GE Capital).

Raman started his entrepreneurial career with Spectramind eServices which is the biggest success stories in the Indian BPO Industry. He is credited with creating more than 30,000 jobs collectively during his tenure at Spectramind, GECIS and American Express.

Wipro Technologies Ltd., India’s third largest IT services company, acquired Spectramind after two years of its inception in July 2002 for Rs. 489 crore ($102 million)-a valuation which was considered rather steep at that point.

He has now tied up with the largest industrial conglomerate in Sri Lanka, John Keells Holdings to develop BPO business across Asia where his company Quatrro, formerly, Raman Roy and Associates holds 22% stake.

Quatrro BPO Solutions is exploring BPO services opportunities in niche areas like mortgage, healthcare, legal services, market research, analytics, among others with plans to later spin them off as independent companies. As a first step in that direction the company has acquired the BPO arm of Flextronics Software Systems, FSS BPO — focused on the telecom vertical. His other stakes include 40% in Annik Technologies, a company involved in the business of market research right from analytics to dataprocessing..

Earlier Raman was the business leader of Accounting Operations at American Express. He was responsible for setting up the global centralized accounting facility in India catering to Europe, U.S. and the Japan Pacific Asia Australia region. The center presently employs more than 1,000 Indians. His contributions included evolving the strategy, designing and development of the center of excellence.

After his successful stint with American Express he joined GE Capital, where he was responsible for setting up the company’s processing capabilities in joint venture with U.S. based Mastech, subsidiary of $270 million iGATE Corporation a global IT & BPO service provider and State Bank of India, India’s leading nationalized bank.