ICTP 007: Future-proofing the Caribbean’s outsourcing industry, with Rejo Sam of Avasant

Since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, many countries worldwide, including those in the Caribbean region have been struggling to jumpstart their economies, and believe that offshore outsourcing/business process outsourcing (BPO) could be the solution. In this podcast episode, we speak with Rejo Sam, of Avasant, one of the leading advisors in the outsourcing space, on what Caribbean countries need to do to continue to grow their BPO industries well into the future.

Episode is also available in Apple iTunes and on Stitcher!

Although they do not seem to be any single set of authoritative figures, from all reports, the size of the global outsourcing industry is still growing. For the information technology (IT)-business process outsourcing segment (BPO), which tends to be of particular interest to most Caribbean countries, that segment is estimated to reach a value of around USD 163.8 billion by the end of 2021, with a compound annual growth rate of 3.1% per year (Source: Cision).

Many Caribbean countries, such as Belize, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago, to name a few, are actively promoting offshore outsourcing as an investment sector. Individual countries, and region as a whole, through the Caribbean Association of Investment Promotions Agencies (CAIPA), are not only continually trying to attract prospective investors, but also eager to drive growth of that industry.

However, one of the biggest challenges to the Caribbean’s IT-BPO space is the fact that the global industry is evolving at a pretty fast pace, with new and emerging technologies transforming, among other things, business strategy and operations. So, countries across the region need to be on the ball in determining how to future-proof their slice of the industry.

To that end, our talk with Rejo Sam, Associate Director and head of the Trinidad and Tobago office of leading outsourcing advisors, Avasant, is especially insightful. Although originally from India, the Caribbean region’s outsourcing space has been a key focus area of Rejo for the last 10 or so years, and he has been based in Trinidad and Tobago for the last two and a half years.

Now, although the point is made in the episode, it is worth repeating. We tend to think of outsourcing as something novel, but most businesses do it, especially Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), when it is not cost effective to have people in-house to execute certain tasks. So, the third party accounting legal and even administrative/clerical services you hire on a continual, or even ad hoc, basis, are part of the outsourcing spectrum, and to varying degrees, will be affected by the transformation that is occurring. So, if you, or you know people who: work in government in investment promotion; are an outsourcing service provider; or tend to purchase outsourced services (a client), this episode is for you.

In our conversation with Rejo, the topics discussed included the following:

Some of the reasons that are still driving businesses to outsource on such a scale that the gobal IT-BPO industry continues to grow
Defining important terms, such as call centres, BPO and hared services
Whether the longstanding concerns across the Caribbean region about call centres, based on the bad experiences of the 1990s, is still valid
Whether Caribbean countries are truly competitive in the IT-BPO space, especially when powerhouses, such as India, the Philippines, China and Mexico, are also in that space
Key the trends in the IT-BPO space, and how the Caribbean region might be affected
The opportunities and threats the region ought to consider
The three to five things Caribbean countries should do in order to better position themselves for the future of BPO.