Barely two months into the year and there has been lots of activity across the benefits administration market, including new contracts, contract expansions, and M&A activity.  Contracts have come out of the U.S. and Europe, including the U.K. and the Netherlands. U.S. activity has come from both the private and public sectors, with deals ranging from as few as 800 employees to mor[...]

Germany’s fiscal success story presents an interesting value proposition for the local customer management services (CMS) BPO market. Real GDP in Germany grew by 1.5% in 2014 and current forecasts indicate that, driven by a strong labor force, high consumption and favorable energy prices, Germany should be able to maintain this level of growth through 2015 and accelerate to around the 2.0% m[...]

By Amy Gurchensky, Liz Rennie and Gary Bragar With total HRO service growth in the high single digits in 2014, service providers are growing both organically and inorganically to meet clients’ needs. The primary reasons for M&A and partnerships across HRO service lines were to enhance service delivery capability (60%) and support geographic expansion (40%). Here we take a closer look [...]

I recently visited San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with CMS vendor Alorica. This nearshore America delivery location offers a low cost, educated workforce with strong native neutral Spanish delivery, as well as emerging support for English and Portuguese. The country is in the process of making English its official second language. Honduras, and specifically the city of San Pedro Sula, have battled n[...]

NelsonHall, the leading global BPO and IT outsourcing analyst firm, has today launched a new tool to assist strategic sourcing managers in assessing vendor capability in Property & Casualty Insurance BPO for the automotive sector. The NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation and Assessment Tool (NEAT) for P&C BPO in the automotive sector is now available to NelsonHall clients, and is also available[...]

In the last twelve months we have more customer management services (CMS) BPO investment in South Africa, including  Webhelp setting up centers in Cape Town and Johannesburg with an agent headcount approaching 1,000 Capita transitioning part of its O2 support to Cape Town in the form of a ~1,400 seat operation. One (of many) attributes that make South Afr[...]

So far, 2014 has been a mixed year for Quindell; it faced damning speculation from Gotham City Research in April (which has since been rejected) and a failed partnership with the RAC in September, which would have seen ingenie’s telematics services being made available to all drivers, not just 17 to 25 year olds, from July. On the plus side, there has also been a number of signi[...]

NelsonHall recently attended Sitel’s analyst day and client advisory board meeting in Las Vegas, where I had the opportunity to discuss CMS market trends. Click here to view a brief video. Sitel wants to be known for creating great experiences, and its focus now is ‘people first’. It recently hired a new chief HR officer, Elsa Zambrano, who has created a new executiv[...]

Concerns have been expressed about the future of the traditional benefits administration market with the advent of private health insurance exchanges: will the market move from a B2B model to a B2C where benefits administration as we know it will disappear?  Rest assured, while the benefits administration market will undergo some transformation, it will not disappear entirely for the follo[...]

NelsonHall recently attended CSS Corp’s analyst day and OneWorld conference. The overriding theme of the day was a reinforcement of the company’s direction; CEO Tiger Ramesh emphasized his ambition for CSS Corp to become the leading global tech support service provider, as emphasized in the company’s new by-line “Wired to Support”. A new leadership team has been [...]

NIIT is set to launch its latest offering to the insurance market next week, in the form of an upgraded policy and claims administration system which will join its existing set of insurance tools. NIIT has delivered IT services to its Lloyds of London clients for some 20-years, using its insurance specific tools: Subscribe: NIIT’s existing policy administration platform, a multi-cur[...]

Last week, ADP hosted its 6th annual analyst day at its new Innovation Lab in NYC.  The space, partly still under construction and featuring a rooftop garden, provides a very collaborative work environment. A current focus at the Lab is creating a new user experience for HR processes. The new user experience for pre-onboarding is live in Vantage HCM, and the benefits en[...]

Sitel has been awarded a two year 800 FTE CMS contract by Danish telecom provider TDC, following an initial contact that was made with twelve potential suppliers in November 2013. This is TDC’s largest foray into outsourcing its CMS function by agent number and by total value, with headcount representing approximately one third of total CMS capacity. The contract includes the transfer of [...]

Last week, Mercer released preliminary results from its annual national survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans 2014, which discussed health benefit cost expectations for 2015.  Some of the key findings of the survey included: Health benefit costs per employee will increase ~3.9% on average in 2015 or ~5.9% if employers make no changes to their health plans for 2015 Around 32% of em[...]

TeleTech recently briefed NelsonHall on its growing healthcare sector business. A few years ago, TeleTech shifted its go-to -market strategy from being capability-led to sector-led. One of its key target sectors is healthcare, where TeleTech’s focus is U.S. tier 1 health insurance payers, providers and life sciences companies, also the personal health products sector. [...]

Overall H1 HRO M&A activity is up year-over-year, and acquisition activity has increased in nearly all service lines except learning.   While learning M&A activity was high in H1 2013, this year, M&A activity in H1 2014 was strongest in the benefits administration market, and it’s occurring in both the U.S. and U.K. as vendors strengthen their DC contribution capability.&[...]

NelsonHall, the leading global BPO and IT outsourcing analyst firm, has today launched a new tool to assist strategic sourcing managers in assessing vendor capability in multi-process HR outsourcing (MPHRO). The MPHRO tool is available to NelsonHall clients and is also available for a limited period free-of-charge to strategic sourcing managers. In addition to a comparison of overall ve[...]

Genpact’s Q2 2014 results show similar mid-single digit (5%) top line growth to Q1 (4.9%), in line with prior guidance for the year of 4%-6% (this has now been adjusted to 5-7% to include a revenue contribution from its Q2 acquisition of Pharmalink). But it is substantially below the 12.1% growth seen in 2013.   EBIT margin was 13.0%, down both sequentially (-7 bps) and y/y (-157 bps[...]

Be it in support of healthcare, the London market or consulting capabilities, the U.K. insurance BPO market is seeing a lot of acquisitive action from four major players who have already made significant acquisitions in the H1 2014.  Starting with two of the most acquisitive vendors in insurance BPO: Innovation Group and Quindell continue to build operational scale Earlier this month, A[...]

With like-for-like growth of 10.3% this is another strong quarter for Teleperformance although it continues to be challenged to its exposure to exchange rate fluctuations in the LATAM region resulting in reported revenue growth of 4.1%. Its Brazil business is contending with a stalling economy and a sharply depreciating currency, although it is still profitable and[...]