GBS WORLD NEWS | WEEK 2 | NOVEMBER 2022
A major data breach via a ransomware attack was reported by American collections provider, Convergent Outsourcing. Unauthorized actors have gained access to confidential and sensitive information, including customer names, contact information, financial account numbers and Social Security numbers. Convergent Outsourcing has been blamed for deploying weak data security measures.
Meanwhile, there was positive news from Canada where global customer experience (CX) management firm, Alida, has secured a US$60 million syndicated credit facility from the National Bank of Canada. The funding offers the company significant capital to continue its long-term growth trajectory, which is focused on providing customer, employee, product and brand experiences.
For a second consecutive year, the US-based cloud-native CX platform, NICE, has been recognized as a Technology Leader in the 2022 SPARK Matrix™ for Voice of the Customer (VoC) Platform report. NICE was given the strongest rating for technology excellence by Quadrant Knowledge Solutions in their market insights report, which evaluates and ranks 22 vendors.
Egypt is poised to successfully attract several GBS operators to its shores after the liberalization of the Egyptian Pound against the US Dollar. The move has made the North African country highly competitive against other competing offshore locations, said Egypt’s Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA). This is complemented by Egypt’s favorable time zone, the availability of trained talent and advanced infrastructure.
Nipping at the heels is Eastern Europe, which is also becoming a favored offshore location, especially for IT services, among key source markets, according to a Reuters article. Inflationary pressures in the US, UK and central Europe are shifting offshored services eastwards where operating and salary costs are significantly lower. For instance, Silicon Valley-based Pure Storage has doubled the number of engineers at its Prague, Czechia center and plans to quadruple them again from 2023 to 2024.
A Japanese solutions integrator and call center technology service provider, Communication Business Avenue (CBA), has announced its collaboration with CareAR™, a Xerox company and service experience management (SXM) leader, to provide its SXM platform to enterprises in Japan and other Asia-Pacific locations. Through this partnership, CBA is able to deploy the CareAR SXM platform suite available in Japanese, Indonesian, Chinese Mandarin and Malay languages.
The global Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) market is projected to reach US$25,3 billion by 2028, from a current market value of US$8,4 billion, according to the latest industry report available on 360 Research Reports. During the forecast period, the global RPO market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17%. Some of the key operators mentioned in the report include Alexander Mann Solutions, Adecco, Manpower Group and ADP.
