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Published on March 11, 2008

Girija Pande, head of TCS and regional director for the Asia-Pacific, said the company was entering the Thai market in a joint venture with local partner Firstech Solutions to provide business-process outsourcing (BPO) and information-technology (IT) outsourcing services to the insurance industry. The company hopes to start operations next month.

The company plans to provide BPO and IT services to the government and other Thai customers in the areas of banking, finance and telecommunications.

For banking and finance customers, TCS will provide data-warehousing systems, customer-relationship-management software and a single point of service.

"We are negotiating with several top banks, both Thai and international. We aim to have about five or six banks as our customers in the next 12-18 months," Pande said.

In the telecom sector, TCS will provide billing solutions and operations support to major telecom operators in Thailand. It also plans to provide three solutions to the government: an electronic registration system, a value-added-tax solution and Web-based citizen services.

"We will recruit 80-90 employees for Thailand in the next 18 months. At the moment, we have only 20 people. Thailand is our latest move in the Asean region, besides Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines," Pande said.

Pande said TCS's profit of about US$1 billion (Bt31.52) was about a third of the Tata group's $3-billion net profit, which includes automobiles and steel. TCS is growing at 35-40 per cent.

Falcon Insurance is the joint venture's first customer in Thailand. TCS and Firstech will provide insurance-application and IT-outsourcing services under the application-service-provider model.

This will help Falcon speed up its time to market of new insurance products and customise them for customers.

Falcon will be able to reduce lead time on product development, streamline operations and cut business costs.

Falcon Insurance CEO Oran Vongsurapichet said the IT-outsourcing service provided by TCS and Firstech would help the company focus on its core business effectively and minimise investments.

The Nation