In February 2024, ResultsCX made its third European acquisition since 2022, adding U.K. specialist BPS and CX services provider Huntswood. This move complements ResultsCX’s roadmap to gain a presence in European markets, diversify offshore delivery, and target the high-growth financial services sectors. I recently spoke with ResultsCX MD & CEO Rajesh Subramaniam about the deal and the emerging opportunities.

Domain specialist in U.K.-regulated industries

Huntswood was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Reading. It provides new customer onboarding, customer care, inbound and outbound sales, contact center back-office processing and admin work, RPO, consulting, operational resiliency, and continuity. It also offers specialized services for regulated industries, such as case management, remediation, support for vulnerable customers, regulated claims and complaints investigation and processing, paraplanning, credit management and collections, protection against financial crime, fraud resolution, alert management in KYC, and sanctions screening.

Other specialized capabilities come from SMEs providing risk assessment, regulatory health checks and due diligence, business QA, assisting companies to comply with regulations, staff training and certification, governance, and cyber advisory practice.

Huntswood has ~5k employees in Reading, Liverpool, and Glasgow, as well as WAH employees in England and Scotland, and in Durban (2 sites) and Cape Town, South Africa. It has ~60 clients, including most of the U.K.’s high street banks and multinational retail banks, financial services firms, consumer credit organizations, life and pension insurers, water utilities, energy providers, and retailers.

ResultsCX will manage Huntswood as a portfolio company retaining the strong national brand.

Addressing market needs in a tighter regulatory environment

In July 2023, the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) rolled out a Consumer Duty Act, a set of rules and guidance for retail consumer sales and support, pricing, and products and services; for example, for the providers and advisors of financial and insurance products. For 2024, the regulator is increasing its enforcement activity.

With this latest acquisition, ResultsCX aims to capture this expanding market in the U.K. on the back of Huntswood’s client portfolio in regulated industries. A particular opportunity is integrating intelligent automation and AI, for example, in complaint control processes. Financial services and U.S. healthcare payer are two main target segments for ResultsCX, with potential for hypergrowth and room for disruption of CX services, adoption of new technology, and requirements for highly-specialized domain experience.

For the BFSI sectors, ResultsCX looks at higher value opportunities driving boardroom discussions, such as responding to changing regulatory frameworks and identifying white spaces for rapid customer acquisition and experience strategy. One such area is mortgages. U.K. lenders are facing a significant number of expiring fixed-rate mortgages in 2024, with sizable rises in payments and need for remortgaging.

EMEA focus and growth plans

ResultsCX has been active in internationalizing its markets, starting with the tuck-in acquisition of Bulgarian CX services provider 60K in 2022, which first established its European presence. It was followed by the Irish CX services player Zevas Communications in August 2023. 60K added nearshore U.K., multilingual European and North American capacity and client base, supported from Bulgaria with strengths in technical support and a flagship telecom and media clients. Zevas added customer care, technical support, B2B sales, and content moderation capability from Cork with a flagship payment processing account. With Huntswood, ResultsCX’s European business will expand to ~$225m annually.

ResultsCX’s M&A strategy aligns with the increased interest shown by North American CX services players in acquiring capabilities in the EMEA region in the last year. The most notable of these were Telepeformance’s acquisition of Majorel and Concentrix combining with Webhelp in 2023.

Ambitious plans within the existing portfolio

Since 2021, when PE ChrysCapital acquired ResultsCX and recruited Rajesh Subramaniam for the CEO role in 2022, the company has grown from ~$400m to ~$650m annual revenues, and it claims a 70-75% improvement in EBITDA over the period. The business scaled to ~23k employees in ~25 sites globally.

The company is utilizing India for CX technology development and analytics with shared services for global WFM and QA; for example, optimizing Huntswood’s WFM, learning and development, and attrition management.

It also plans to use the newly acquired South African capacity to expand offshore support for the U.K. and capture the need for U.S. delivery from the country, mainly for global brands and business models. South Africa already handles complex claims and fraud processes for U.K. non-banking clients in insurance and utilities. With Huntswood’s client portfolio, ResultsCX can also scale delivery to nearshore Bulgaria and the Republic of Ireland. For example, ResultsCX Ireland already has experience with fintech and regtech, particularly in B2B sales.

The main growth engines for ResultsCX will be existing clients, to land and expand by diversifying their delivery network and broadening the scope of LOBs. In the case of Huntswood, this will be from the higher consulting and premium services to scaled BPS with process excellence and automation. One of the most promising offerings will combine sales process expertise with analytics tfor he financial services sectors. With one of these accounts, the company aims to grow it from $7m per year to $30m over the next three years.

In the longer term, ResultsCX plans to achieve a fully-integrated CX services model with L0 support handled by GenAI and intelligent automation, while more complex customer interactions are supported by SMEs who can offer customer engagement and empathy in care scenarios and consultative selling and brand advocacy in revenue generation.