Prudential's captive arm to employ 700 more

MUMBAI: PPMS, a captive of the UK-based insurance and financial services company Prudential, is expanding its India presence and opening a new facility in Vikhroli with a capacity of 600 seats. The facility will be operational early next year, said Sanjay Razdan, MD, PPMS India. PPMS as a captive has been expanding gradually unlike third-party BPOs, which ramp up numbers quite fast. The company’s employee base is around 1,350 and the new facility will add another 700 recruits to PPMS.

“Currently, we have about 700 people working from our Vikhroli office, but now we are expanding and constructing another facility in the same premises,” said Mr Razdan. The company will invest around £6m in the new facility.
“We have not been ramping up like third party BPOs because our attrition rate is also very low at about 20%,” said Rosie Harris, COO, Prudential UK.

PPMS started operations in ’03 with low-end voice related work being offshore to India by the parent company Prudential from UK. The parent company has two customer support centres in Europe. “We liked the quality of work and talent pool here and decided to move slightly high-end work and see the response,” Ms Harris said.

PPMS is now offshoring more and more complex work here. As of now, voice contributes only 30% to the total PPMS India business while the rest comes from the non-voice segment. PPMS currently does market research, analytics, finance and accounts and risk management for its parent company which uses this data to service their clients in the UK. PPMS India was started with an initial investment of $10m. The business here has touched £12m and is expected to experience double-digit growth.