A leading Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) company is to create 1,000 call centre jobs in Northern Ireland.
ICICI OneSource, one of India’s biggest BPOs, with 8,000 staff in Bangalore and Bombay, will create the jobs over the next two years in Belfast.
So far 60 staff have begun a seven-week training course run by Indian call centre experts.
“This is not about moving work from India to the UK; it is about the growth and expansion of our business,” said Matthew Vallance, the European managing director of ICICI Onesource.
“People are very familiar with the Irish accent and we think it will work very well,” he said.
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The traditional outsourcing model of sending business from the West to countries like India and China has recently evolved in ways unthinkable a few years ago. ICICI’s news comes shortly after strikes in July at state-run banks in India after staff learned that back-office functions would be farmed out to cheaper locations.
