“That guy was a maverick,” says Raman. “He was so quick to realise the potential of what we’d done at American Express. He asked me, ‘What do you think we’ll lose if this thing doesn’t work?’ I added 3 million to the number we’d already talked about and said ‘$10 million.’ ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘That’s loose change. I’m going to put the money into an account for you and nobody will ask you how you spent it. Just set up something like you did at American Express.’ Without him it never would have happened. I would never have got approvals for the enormous money I paid for satellite dishes and everything else.”5
Raman had been working at the rock face of outsourcing for a decade when he arrived at GECIS and he had a more detailed conception than his American bosses of where this line of enquiry could go. In 1998, he set up a makeshift experiment in the Gurgaon office. It was India’s first international call centre. Sitting in that office, workers handled credit card customer service calls from the United States. His fellow board members at GE in India had expressly forbidden him to pursue this experiment, so he concealed it from them and invited Gary Wendt to come and have a look.
“It was modelled on one of those old hairdressing shops. I rigged up curtains to separate the workers. If my colleagues had seen what I was doing I would have been fired. There was sensitive information on the screens and the whole thing was very ramshackle. I had no budgets — I started with just twenty people.
“When Gary Wendt came to visit he looked at this hairdressing shop and he was stunned. I can still see him coming down the stairs and shaking his head. He said, ‘I don’t think you understand what a revolution you’ve started’. He went away and became an evangelist for it in GE. Our cost per unit was less than 50 per cent of the existing and our quality was higher. In the US they were employing school drop-outs; we were employing people with college degrees. Before long we were providing services not just to GE Capital but to the whole General Electric group.
“It required massive lobbying to get to that point. International telecommunications were still a government monopoly, and the government was suspicious. When I went to ask for international bandwidth for that first hairdressing shop they thought I must be involved in espionage, because no one had ever requested that much capacity before. And though it was possible to rent a private international line, it was illegal to connect it to any public network, which would bypass the government monopoly — the fine was something like $150,000 per day. It took us eight months to get an exemption from that, and even then they only gave us permission for a pilot. They didn’t comprehend what we were doing. We had to print out definitions of call centres from the internet and show them to government officials so they would understand what we were trying to do.”
Raman is one of those people who have the satisfaction of seeing their own quiet realisation becoming a global revolution. “The original ambition,” he says, “our ultimate horizon for this, stretched to about a thousand people. But it grew far beyond that. It became hundreds of thousands of people and it changed the whole society.” Before long the rush for these jobs was such that the company was forced to alert the police whenever they were holding interviews, so great were the crowds outside the office. People came from far away with their whole families, and they would sit outside the office for days. The company had to hand out food and water.
GECIS delivered a wide range of services to General Electric companies. Customer service phone calls were only a small part of the corporate functions transferred to India, which became increasingly more complex and specialised as time went on. Systems and training were developed to a high level of effectiveness, and Indian workers did not have only mindless and repetitive tasks to fulficlass="underline" many of them went to the US for briefings and became valued employees of the global organisation.
After a while Raman began to feel that a much greater opportunity was being missed. “It was great to have the trappings of corporate life, big cars and clubs and everything, but I saw the possibility of doing something much bigger. I told GE that the real opportunity was to provide outsourced services to other corporations but they wanted to keep it for themselves. So in 2000 I set up Spectramind, which provided these services to all the big corporations — Microsoft, Dell, HP, Cisco, AOL, American Express, Citibank. Within a few years GE followed suit. They sold GECIS and it became an independent company called Genpact providing outsourced services to all.”
Still headquartered in Gurgaon, Genpact is now, with annual revenues in excess of a billion dollars, as large as some of its Fortune 1000 clients. It has acquired other outsourcing companies in places as far-flung as Guatemala, China, Poland, South Africa and the Philippines, employs over fifty thousand people around the world and provides outsourced services in some thirty languages. It is so good at what it does that it has begun to make significant acquisitions in the United States. Because of its specialisation it can run non-core corporate functions more efficiently and to a higher level of quality than most corporations can do themselves. It has taken over substantial parts, for instance, of Walgreens’ accountancy, which it now operates as outsourced functions in America.
After Spectramind was acquired by Indian computer giant Wipro, Raman, still restless in big corporate culture, left to set up Quatrro. As wages rise in India and some of the more basic outsourced work is moved to other countries, Quatrro has looked further and further up the value chain. The several thousand people it employs to supply their expertise to the world’s companies include medical doctors, lawyers, engineers and journalists. And Quatrro targets a different market. “No one was servicing small and medium-sized American companies,” Raman says. “They need all kinds of services they don’t want to set up for themselves — from risk management to tax reporting. And there are a lot of them. The fees are much smaller: my average client only pays $5,000 a month. But I have 10,000 clients.”
Raman has presumably amassed a significant personal fortune, but that seems to be the least of his satisfactions. What excites him is change. He invests from his own wealth in the projects of younger entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurialism, he feels, is the world’s most powerful redeeming force.
“The BPO industry was catalytic. Nowadays, this industry earns about $15 billion in India. It employs 800,000 people, with an indirect employment of 4 million. And it’s no coincidence that people started writing novels and making films about those people because they were in many ways the vanguard of the new India. They were hard-working, technology-savvy and they were exposed to the global environment. They were part of a massive change.
“Until the 1990s there were so few opportunities that many people stayed in education and did an MA just to save face. To conceal the fact that they were basically unemployed. So when we set up GECIS we found a big educated population in Delhi waiting for us to absorb them. But we soon ran out of local people and had to look further afield. In those days, more than half of Gurgaon apartments were occupied by people who had migrated from smaller towns to work in our industry.