Indian firm will operate call center for Barclays

An Indian outsourcing company will take over operations of a 370-employee credit card call center in Colorado Springs for British banking giant Barclays PLC amid a shakeup in the local call center industry.

Firstsource Solutions Ltd., a Mumbai, India, company that operates 24 call centers worldwide, will take over the center at 5725 Mark Dabling Blvd. on March 1. Firstsource plans to use the center to attract other credit card and financial services clients as additional customers, company officials said Thursday.

The Firstsource takeover will not result in any job loss- es or changes in pay and benefits, said Kelly Weaver, who runs the center for Barclays and will continue in that role under Firstsource. The sign on the building will continue to carry the Barclays name, she said.

The move comes as ICT Group Inc. is closing the Colorado Springs call center it operates for cell phone provider Virgin Mobile. That will put all 210 employees out of work on Feb. 29. The company shuttered four U.S. call centers last year as it moved work overseas.

While the outsourcing trend has sent work and thousands of U.S. jobs overseas, Colorado Springs has mostly benefited from companies outsourcing call center work.

Florida-based PRC LLC opened a call center here a year ago that within six months employed 550 people. The company announced plans to add 400 more jobs by the end of 2007.

PRC added 50 of those jobs before filing for U.S. Bankruptcy Court protection last month to restructure its debt. The company’s Springs center handles calls for clients in the telecommunications, cable, satellite and transportation industries.

“Colorado Springs has become an attractive location for companies that are outsourcing their call center services,” said Mike Kazmierski, president of the Colorado Springs Economic Development Corp., which works to recruit and retain local employers. “It is really linked to the ability to offer a greater level of expertise” than overseas call centers.

Call centers that provide services for multiple clients — like those of Firstsource and PRC — are more stable than company-run call centers because they aren’t affected as much by the loss of business within a single company, Kazmierski said.

Firstsource hopes to expand the Springs center as it attracts work from the company’s existing clients and signs up new customers, said John Ardy, the company’s executive vice president for North America. Those clients include Bank of America, HSBC and Capital One.

“We wanted a banking and financial services hub in a Western time zone, and for those reasons we were interested in this location,” Ardy said. “In five years, we would want this (center) to be a multiclient location that has grown substantially.”

He declined to say how big the local call center could get.

Firstsource acquired a 240-employee call center in Amherst, N.Y., in 2002 that has grown to about 700 workers as the company has added clients that include three of the nation’s five largest banks and six of the 10 largest credit card issuers, Ardy said.

“We have a need for additional capacity in North America, and Colorado Springs will serve as one of our marquee and showcase operations,” Ardy said. “There are certain types of calls and customers who want a high-quality experience, and we can do that from a U.S. base.”

Barclays, the world’s largest bank, sought Firstsource to take over the center because the company can use its other locations to temporarily handle the rapid growth of Barclays’ credit card operation. It now ranks at the nation’s 10th-largest, with more than 3 million cardholders, Weaver, who runs the center, said.

“This gives us more flexibility to handle that growth. We can go to Firstsource and tell them we need a certain number of seats” to handle additional calls and the company can provide that temporarily from its other centers until it expands here, Weaver said.

The Barclays center began taking calls two years ago and has grown as Barclays has added dozens of new partners for whom it issues credit cards, including Denver-based Frontier Airlines, Carnival Cruise Lines, BJ’s Wholesale Club and Gulf Oil.

Barclays will continue to operate another call center at its U.S. headquarters in Delaware. Firstsource didn’t need the Delaware center since it already has the New York center serving clients in the same time zone.

Firstsource was started in 2001 and is one of the world’s fastest-growing outsourcing companies with its revenue surging by an average of about 80 percent a year to what the company has forecasted at $320 million in the fiscal year that ends March 31.

Firstsource also operates call centers serving the financial services, medical and telecommunications industries in Fort Scott, Kan.; Louisville, Ky.; Rockford, Ill.; Argentina; India; the Philippines; and the United Kingdom.

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0234 or wayneh@gazette.com

FIRSTSOURCE SOLUTIONS LTD. AT A GLANCE

Headquarters: Mumbai, India Call centers: Amherst, N.Y.; Fort Scott, Kan.; Louisville, Ky.; Rockford, Ill.; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Manila, the Philippines; Belfast and Londonderry, United Kingdom; 10 cities in India

Employees: 17,000 (2,400 U.S.) Founded: 2001 Stock: Traded on the National Stock Exchange of India under symbol FSL.NS; closed at $50.60, down $1.75 on Thursday; major investors include ICICI Group, Metavente Corp., Temasek Holdings of Singapore and Sequoia Capital India

Chief executive and managing director: Ananda Mukerji Customers: Three of the five largest U.S. banks; six of the 10 largest U.S. credit card issuers; two of the world’s largest telecommunications companies; three “Fortune 100” health care companies