Since my September 2014 blog, Wellness Outsourcing on the Rise, there have been some key developments in employee wellness programs, along with new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidance that enables employers to offer incentives to wellness participants of up to 30% of their insurance premium. With employees keenly aware of the annual rise in their out-of-pocket health insuran[...]

NelsonHall recently visited one of Convergys’ Intelligent Contact (IC) centers in Belfast, Northern Ireland. IC originally started life as LBM in 1996, then was acquired by Stream in 2013, which was itself acquired by Convergys in 2014. IC is a specialist sales division of Convergys, consisting of agents across multiple centers in Belfast and Greater Manchester, performing a mix of outb[...]

STARTEK is to acquire Customer Management Services (CMS) BPO provider ACCENT Marketing Services, LLC ("Accent") from MDC Partners Inc. for $16m in cash plus working capital adjustments. Founded in 1993 and headquartered in Jeffersonville, IN, Accent has 2.3k employees and delivers services from six locations in the U.S. and J[...]

NelsonHall recently attended Dimension Data’s ‘Perspectives’ event in Prague at which Dimension Data, a subsidiary of Japanese owned NTT, detailed progress towards its goal of doubling 2014 revenue to $12bn by 2018. In FY 2015 Dimension Data achieved revenues of $6.7bn, up 48% in the two years from FY 2013. CEO Brett Dawson confirmed that Dimension Data is on track to achieve its[...]

Two common themes in the marketing collateral of vendors providing Customer Management Services (CMS) are the use of analytics and transformation.  For analytics, a popular claim is the use of big data for predictive modeling within contact centers. But is it really happening? The reality is that, while certain vendors are using data for simple predictive modeling, this is still a distinct[...]

While organizations across retail, consumer goods and, in particular high-tech, continue to face cost pressure, their attention is increasingly moving to addressing their competitive positioning and innovation in product development, particularly to meet the needs of developing economies. Indeed there is strong pressure to enter new territories in both the high-tech and CPG sectors. Noneth[...]

HP Enterprise Services has announced Q2 FY 2015 results, for the period ending April 30, 2015: Revenue was $4,817m, down 15.5% y/y, and down 10% in constant currency (CC), reflecting key account run off and weakness in EMEA Segment earnings before taxes (EBT) were $194m, a margin of 4.0%, up 143 bps y/y. Q2 FY 2015 revenue by service line (with y/y revenue growth) was: [...]

CSC has announced a planned break up by October 25 2015 into two firms: CSC U.S. Public Sector (FY 15 revenues: $4.1bn) and CSC Global Commercial ($8.1bn, also includes non-U.S. public sector). See here for details: The announcement ends a long period of speculation over the posssible sale of CSC's North American Public Sector unit[...]

Today’s capital markets industry is severely capital constrained, and this is likely to get worse over the next few years. Internal deployments of new or improved solutions will become harder to resource (both in terms of cash and manpower), and managed services will be the preferred way to improve operations. Furthermore, managed services that offer to improve process and/or vendor manageme[...]

It seems like yesterday that the concept of a private health insurance exchange was novel: it’s hard to believe that active exchanges have been available from benefits consultancies for three years, and that retiree exchanges are nearly 11 years old. Here’s a quick update and review of how the private exchange landscape has changed in this short time. Active exchanges are mu[...]

Over the past few weeks the major payment processing vendors have reported first quarter 2015 financial results, and they show a noticeable slowdown n y/y growth from 2014 (refer to NelsonHall Tracking Service articles for detailed analysis of the quarterly results). Summary results for Q1 2015 (in USD unless stated otherwise) are as follows: Card networks: Mastercard: +2.7%&nbs[...]

Capgemini recently briefed NelsonHall on changes in its analytics and big data practice. The company has recently rebranded its business information management (BIM) global service line (GSL) as Insights & Data (I&D) and announced the availability in H2 2015 of its analytics platform, ‘Insights-as-a-Service’. Background In 2010 Capgemini created BIM as a GSL which, in Cap[...]

During a recent visit to London I had the opportunity to visit the HGS contact center in Chiswick. The 500-seat center is focused on supporting accounts with broad language capability needs and it also provides specialist client programs beyond traditional customer care support. The industry sectors supported from the center include automotive, consumer packaged goods (CPG), government, and health[...]

Financial planning for retirement readiness is a big concern for many individuals, and the stress is often magnified the closer one gets to retirement. For years, organizations and DC administration providers have been honing different approaches to address this. One of the biggest challenges in establishing a model that works stems from diversity within the workforce. Earlier approac[...]

At Equifax Workforce Solutions Forum 2015, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was one of the main topics of discussion. And it’s no wonder why: ACA is now in effect, and many U.S. corporations and individuals are still not ready, despite the act’s effective date being delayed from January 2014 to January 2015. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that employer-shared ACA respon[...]

Capgemini announced today its intention to acquire IGATE. Capgemini is offering $48 per share, or $4.04bn, a premium of ~5% over current IGATE share price. IGATE had debt at end 2014 of $686m and cash on hand of $192m. This offer gives IGATE an enterprise value of ~$4.53bn. Capgemini is thus paying a massive 15.5 x 2014 earnings ($292m) and nearly 3.6 x 2014 revenues. The acquisition [...]

NelsonHall recently spent two weeks in India, focusing on latest developments in software testing and digital transformation services. We met with Capgemini Group’s Testing Global Service Line (TGSL), the group’s software testing practice (across Capgemini and Sogeti) and discussed key topics including its push towards cross-client shared service centers, and IP development (with the r[...]

Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is about more than creating a nice-looking career page with exciting reasons why candidates should join a company. It is also about empowering recruiters to use their corporate brand flexibly for individual candidate situations. This is well known to recruitment processing outsourcing (RPO) companies. However, an effective EVP can go even further. In a candidate[...]

NelsonHall recently met with the management of Atos to discuss the acquisitions of Bull and Xerox ITO and the progress being made by Atos in adopting Indian offshoring. Note that this meeting took place before Atos' Consulting & Systems Integration analyst day. Bull: Is An Expanded Portfolio Relevant? With its acquisition of Bull, Atos has acquired an IT firm with a significant level[...]

BPO contract TCV in Q1 2015 continued the improvement in contract activity seen in Q4 2014, with BPO TCV picking up and gaining momentum over the past two quarters following relatively low levels of BPO TCV awarded in Q2 and Q3 2014. In particular, Q4 2014 showed a 6% improvement in BPO TCV year-on-year, with BPO accounting for 31% of total outsourcing TCV. Q1 2015 BPO TCV performance then impr[...]