Top Diversity and Inclusion Initiative


AICPA & CIMA

Cognizant (GB) Limited (Latvia)

Danske Bank Lithuania

Diageo Zrt.

ExxonMobil Hungary

Franklin Templeton

Fujitsu Technology Solutions

HSBC Service Delivery (Polska)

Linklaters Poland

Nasdaq Global Technology and Business Services Vilnius

State Street International GmbH Poland

Thermo Fisher Scientific Hungary
Most “Dynamically Developing” City – CEE


Debrecen

Rīga

Vilnius
Most “Dynamically Developing” City – Poland


Bydgoszcz

Lodz

Poznan

Katowice

Tricity
Emerging City of the Year – CEE


Chisinau

Debrecen

Kaunas

Olomouc (Czech)
Best University-Business Cooperation of the Year


Accenture Danubia Advanced Technology Center

Citco Vilnius

Future for Electronics (Kaunas) (Continental Automotive; HELLA Lithuania; Kitron; Littelfuse LT; Teltonika Networks)

Debrecen Business Service Centers Roundtable

Harman International Ltd.

IBM Slovensko, spol. s r.o.

Moody`s

ON Semiconductor a.s.

PMI Budapest, Hungarian Chapter

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. Hungary Branch

Western Union Lithuania
Top Process-Automation Implementation of the Year


Aptiv

Avis Budget Group

Citco Vilnius

Cognizant Technology Solutions

Corning Hungary

LafargeHolcim European Business Services

PKP ENERGETYKA CUW SP Z O O

Stefanini

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. Hungary Branh

Tesco Business Services & Technology

ThyssenKrupp Gdańsk
Most-Promising New-entrant BSC of the Year


Aebi Schmidt Polska Sp. z o.o.

Alter Domus

Comdata Hungary

Dexcom Lithuania

EPAM

ITELENCE

Metinvest Business Service

SD Worx Poland Sp. z o.o.

TK Elevator Solution Center Europe

Trivium Packaging BSC Kft.

UAB Accenture Lithuania

Zimmer Biomet
Most-Transformed Workplace of the Year – CEE


ABInBev

Alcon

AmerisourceBergen / World Courier (Lithuania)

Cognizant Technology Solutions

Danske Bank A/S Lithuania Branch

EPAM Systems (Poland)

ExxonMobil Hungary

LafargeHolcim European Business Services

Marsh, European Business Support Centre

ON Semiconductor Slovakia, a.s.

Rocket Software

SEB Global Services Center in Riga and Vilnius

Stefanini

Telia Global Services Lithuania

thyssenkrupp Group Services Gdańsk

Worldline Financial Services EU
Business Services Firm of the Year – Baltics


allnex Latvia SIA

AmerisourceBergen / World Courier (Lithuania)

Circle K Business Centre

Citco Vilnius

SEB Global Services in Riga and Vilnius

SIA Tieto Latvia (TietoEVRY group)

Telia Global Services Lithuania
Business Services Firm of the Year – Hungary


AGCO Hungary Kft

Citibank Europe plc Hungarian Branch Office

Corning Hungary

Cushman & Wakefield (Portfolio Services Centre Budapest)

Diageo Zrt.

Process Solutions LTD.
Business Services Firm of the Year – Romania


Allianz Services Romania

Ness

Societe Generale Global Solution Centre S.A.
Business Services Firm of the Year – Czech


ABInBev

Deutsche Telekom Services Europe Czech Republic

ExxonMobil Czech Republic, s.r.o.

IBA CZ s.r.o.
Business Services Firm of the Year – Slovakia


Deutsche Telekom IT Solutions Slovakia

Deutsche Telekom Services Europe Slovakia

IBM Slovensko

ING Business Shared Services

Swiss Re
Business Services Firm of the Year – Warsaw


Marsh, European Business Support Centre

MoneyGram Poland

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.

Worldline Finacial Services
Business Services Firm of the Year – Kraków


Aptiv

IG Group Poland

Krakow Business Services PepsiCo

IAG GBS

TTEC
Business Services Firm of the Year – Wrocław


SSAB Poland

Qiagen
Business Services Firm of the Year – Poznań


Duni EFF

Lumen Technologies
Business Services Firm of the Year – Gdansk/Gdynia


7N

Arla Global Shared Services

Hapag-Lloyd Aktiengesellschaft (S.A.) Oddział w Polsce

thyssenkrupp Group Services Gdańsk

Wipro IT Services Poland
Business Services Firm of the Year – Katowice


Aebi Schmidt Polska Sp. z o.

SD Worx
Business Services Firm of the Year – Lodz


Fujitsu Technology Solutions

Infosys Poland
Top Digital Transformation Services Provider – pan-European


DIGITALL

ELEKS

Stefanini
Top Employer Branding Initiative – CEE


7N

Arla Global Shared Services

ExxonMobil Czech Republic

Franklin Templeton

Krakow Business Services PepsiCo

Ness

SEB Global Services Centre in Riga and Vilnius

SIA Tieto Latvia (TietoEVRY group)

State Street Bank International GmbH, Poland Branch

Telia Global Services Lithuania

Thermo Fisher Scientific Hungary

thyssenkrupp Group Services Gdańsk
Top CSR Initiative of the Year – Poland


Alcon

Credit Suisse (Poland)

IG Group Poland
Top CSR Initiative of the Year – CEE


Accenture Danubia Advanced Technology Center

Allianz Services Romania

AmerisouceBergen/ World Courier (Lithuania)

Danske Bank Lithuania

Diageo Zrt.

Eaton Business Service Center

ELEKS

ExxonMobil Hungary

IBA Group

IBM Slovensko

IQVIA RDS Slovakia

Nasdaq Global Technology and Business Services Vilnius

Școala informală de IT (Educație informală SA)

Société Générale (SG) Global Solution Centre (GSC) Romania

Visma Lithuania
Top BSC HR Director of the Year – CEE


Circle K Business Centre

Cognizant Technology Solutions

Danske Bank

HEINEKEN Global Shared Services (Kraków)

Nasdaq Technology and Business Services in Vilnius
Business Centre Director of the Year – BSC – CEE


Aptiv

Circle K Business Centre

Corning Hungary

Deutsche Telekom Services Europe Slovakia

JTI

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. Hungary Branch

Telia Global Services Lithuania
Business Centre Director of the Year – BSC – Poland


Credit Suisse (Poland)

HEINEKEN Global Shared Services (Kraków)

IG group Poland

Lumen Technologies

Lithuania is willing to host the European Union’s (EU) Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) in Vilnius, Finance Minister Gintare Skaiste has said after a meeting with Paschal Donohoe, Minister for Finance for Ireland and President of the Eurogroup.

The creation of this new authority is a core element of a package of legislative proposals presented by the European Commission with the aim to strengthen the EU's anti-money laundering and countering terrorism financing (AML/CFT) rules.
“Lithuania has expressed its ambition to host such an authority in Vilnius… We have a sizeable network of competences, we have many fintech companies… we have competent people ready to work for such an authority. Therefore, we are among a handful of countries in this Nordic and Visegrad region, which have expressed a wish to host such an authority,” she said during a news conference in Vilnius on Wednesday.

Donohoe also held meetings with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda and Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte.

U.S. provider of outsourced digital services TaskUs said it plans to open offices in Romania, Poland and Malaysia in the first half of 2022. TaskUs has chosen to open an office in Romania's northeastern city of Iasi, the country's second largest, for its highly educated, bilingual talent pools, it said in a press release in December.
"Our vision is to make a positive impact on the best brands in the world, the people we connect with, and our global communities," TaskUs CEO and co-founder Bryce Maddock said.
Operations in the three new locations are expected to start within the first half of 2022.
TaskUs is a provider of outsourced digital services and customer experience to innovative and disruptive technology companies. Leveraging a cloud-based infrastructure, TaskUs serves clients in the fastest-growing sectors, including social media, e-commerce, gaming, streaming media, food delivery, and ridesharing, HiTech, FinTech and HealthTech, according to its website.
As of September 30, TaskUs had approximately 35,600 employees across twenty locations in the United States, the Philippines, India, Mexico, Taiwan, Greece, Ireland, and Colombia.

Unity, the world’s leading platform for creating and operating real-time 3D (RT3D) content, today announced plans to expand operations in Lithuania. The company plans to hire 140 specialists to join its team in Vilnius over the next three years.
Unity Lithuania is primarily looking for developers from different backgrounds in game development and infrastructure to work in software development and QA roles. The company also plans to hire customer service, HR, and procurement professionals. There will be work opportunities for a range of different qualifications — from entry level to highly experienced specialists. For technical roles, knowledge of C# and/or C++ programming languages is a common requirement at Unity.

Unity provides a comprehensive set of software solutions to create, run and monetize interactive, real-time 2D and 3D content for mobile phones, tablets, PCs, consoles, and augmented and virtual reality devices. Creators, ranging from game developers to artists to automotive designers, use Unity to implement their ideas. The company estimates that its platform is now used by around 5.5 million game developers and organisations, of which the most famous are Electronic Arts, Disney, Microsoft, NASA, and Warner Bros.
The company was founded in Copenhagen by Nicholas Francis, Joachim Ante, and David Helgason in 2004. Initially to create a video game, building a custom engine in the process, which would offer easy solutions and workflows to iterate and build their game more efficiently. The trio quickly realized the engine they made could help others. That engine is now widely known as the Unity Engine. Today, Unity has over 5,000 employees worldwide, with more than 160 in Lithuania – a number that is set to grow to 300 in the next few years.
In 2009, Vilnius became the first city outside Denmark that Unity set up operations in. But the company’s relationship with Lithuanian talent goes back even further. Soon after the company was founded, a Lithuanian software engineer, Aras Pranckevičius, became one of the company’s first employees. Currently, specialists in Unity’s offices in Vilnius and Kaunas are developing the company’s core and mobile technologies, alongside carrying out front-line QA functions.
“Unity has been an integral part of the growth of Lithuania’s game industry, bringing world-leading expertise of game development to Lithuania,” says Elijus Čivilis, General Manager of Invest Lithuania. “The company’s expansion plans illustrate the skill and drive of Lithuania’s tech talent, and I hope that Lithuania will remain Unity’s close partner in pioneering technologies used all over the globe.“

International digital innovation company NFQ Technologies has announced starting a new company for its partner, the Western European technology company group, valantic. It is one of the fastest-growing digital solutions, consulting, and software companies in Western Europe, with a team of more than 2000 specialists.
Together with valantic, NFQ will establish a technology and innovation competence centre in Lithuania and plans to hire up to 200 IT specialists within four years. Expansion to Lithuania was dictated by valantic’s success working in partnership with NFQ on joint projects and NFQ’s 20 years of experience with e-commerce businesses.
Among valantic’s clients are more than 500 blue-chip clients, including 28 of the 40 companies listed on Germany’s DAX stock index and large Swiss and Austrian companies, and many prominent medium-sized companies such as Thyssenkrupp, Siemens, AOK, Coop, Telefonica.
Paulius Insoda, the CEO of NFQ Technologies is excited about working with valantic and addressing the core challenges of digitalization, as well as creating digital solutions that help clients gain a strategic advantage over competitors. “Working together on very large and complex projects, we’ve been able to draw on our 20 years of experience and know-how. We’ve learned how to build high-performing international teams of the highest calibre to guarantee our clients’ success, as well as to work on large-scale, complex technology projects,” says P. Insoda.

Honeywell announced in December the launch of its first security operations centre (SOC) in Europe, based in Romania. The SOC focuses on operational technology (OT) cyber threat detection, prevention and management in industrial environments and critical infrastructure. It is staffed by OT cybersecurity experts to serve Honeywell’s customers across the globe in meeting their growing needs for cybersecurity solutions.

A growing number of industrial organisations may not have the appropriate in-house cybersecurity expertise or may have limited funding to grow their security teams. Our OT managed security service solutions provide companies with 24/7 access to OT cybersecurity analytics and experts with highly specialized and diverse cybersecurity skills without the need to significantly grow an internal team of experts.

“We are excited about opening our new centre in Bucharest because of the talent, internet infrastructure and support from local governmental partners,” said Ronald Binkofski, Honeywell president for Central and Eastern Europe. “The centre recently received the ISO 20000-1 certification, demonstrating that our organisation has invested in the best people, processes and technology to deliver world-class services for cybersecurity monitoring and incident response.”

Full Story: Business Review

Sodexo BRS Romania, the leader in extra-salary benefits and reward services to improve the employees’ quality of life, continues the digitalization process assisted by RPA supported by NTT DATA Romania, a trusted global innovator of IT and business services. NTT DATA Romania will help Sodexo develop new RPA processes and maintain the existing RPA solutions.

RPA is helping Sodexo to offer better services to the stakeholders, translated into real improvements in the services delivered to both clients and network partners, facilitating the maintenance processes and communication. It also ensures sustainable automation of all the areas of processes, from the front office to the back office, offering a better experience to our clients and partners.

Using RPA is for us a key tool in the digitization direction, enabling easy access to our platforms and services and real-time answers. We estimate that the time for operational activities, as invoicing, reimbursement, credit notes, will be reduced significantly, in some cases, by a half. At the same time, saving time from routine activities, will enable our employees to specialize in areas where their expertise is more important and will pursue their capability to growth and innovation”, said Laurent Sury, Chief Financial Officer, Sodexo BRS Romania.

NTT DATA Romania’s value-added consists of the specific know-how for any activity flow in customized solutions and services for processes identified to be automatized. The solution will transform business processes by applying best-in-class process blueprints and reusable automation components.

“In an era dictated by responsiveness to customers, robotic process automation (RPA) is fast becoming crucial for all organizations looking for digital transformation. Our RPA expertise helped Sodexo streamline the routine process with RPA to increase the efficiency, speed, and accuracy of business processes. We look further to extending our partnership and supporting Sodexo’s digital transformation process,” said Dragos Căţoiu, Head of Local Business NTT DATA Romania.

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is the world leader in serving science, whose Mission is to enable their customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer. The Budapest site, home to Thermo Fisher’s Global Business Services, has grown significantly over the last year with the opening of a new IT Center of Excellence and hiring more than 200 talented multilinguals.

Thermo Fisher’s global shared services Vice President Dénes Láng talks to the Budapest Business Journal about this impressive growth and how putting people first during COVID-19 drove measurable business results and improved employer branding.

BBJ: How did the Budapest Global Business Services’s story start, and how far have you come?
Dénes Láng: My driver has always been to build something new and special. To open the Hungarian multi-functional center under my leadership in 2018 was a great challenge especially because the company started our shared services journey quite late. We are working to close a gap of 10-plus years within half that time. Since then, we have gone from zero employees to 500 in three years. Because of our people-focused culture, the company’s growth goes hand-in-hand with personal development. In our first two years, 30% of our colleagues were promoted; I, for example, have come to now lead a global organization responsible for shared services.

BBJ: How did the pandemic affect the company?
DL: As a world leader serving science, the company played a crucial role in the fight against the pandemic. In the past year, Thermo Fisher has contributed to countless COVID-19-related projects, played a central role in vaccine development and commercialization, and accelerated investments to support the pandemic response. Fighting COVID has led to many new business opportunities and increased customer expectations; therefore, there was an immense need for growth.
Due to growing demand, the Budapest site faced new HR challenges. Initially, we focused on business services center positions; However, later in 2020, operations were expanded with a new IT Center of Excellence targeting IT professionals. The business strategy for 2020 included the construction of an entirely new IT function. In the middle of the global pandemic, we needed something new - a robust approach to our recruitment processes to achieve our strategic goals. So, we decided to put employer branding at the center of our strategy.

BBJ: What were your aims when building this strategy?
DL: When we built the strategy, we recognized the integral role that employer branding had in supporting the broader business strategy. Our program, which was awarded this year by the Hungarian Public Relations Association, Hungarian Outsourcing Association, and HRKOMM [a competition for the HR and communications professions], provided an integrated approach to candidate experience, employee engagement, social media online recruitment, and university presence. Our goals were to raise brand awareness, have an impact on employee retention, hire at least 60 IT professionals, and involve around 10% of our colleagues in our initiatives.

BBJ: What were the key components of the program?
DL: Initially, the program focused on the establishment of the IT Center of Excellence. Later, the employer brand initiative was extended to the entire organization: Customer Care, HR, and Finance, as well as IT. Forty-six colleagues applied to participate in the program. The most significant innovation was the podcast ‘Career Stories Behind the Science’. This unique format had not previously been used in employer branding in the SSC sector in Hungary. It can be integrated into all points of the employee experience lifecycle while supporting the business strategy.
The program’s impact was clear: we retained our all-time low turnover during the pandemic, we succeeded in involving 56 brand ambassadors in the program, implemented innovative employer branding solutions like the podcast, and built relevant campus relationships reaching more than 18,000 students. Finally, we managed to hire more than 60 IT professionals. We are proud that our case study was published in the Employer Branding Excellence Study Book as the only Hungarian example in 2021.

BBJ: What are Thermo Fisher Budapest operation’s future plans?
DL: The goal of Thermo Fisher shared services model is to be the backbone of the company and our Budapest operations plays a critical regional role in achieving that. We are currently working on personnel growth, continuing our employer branding activities and further developing functional skills of the team. We are planning to expand the services in scope and scale to improve customer experience and stakeholder satisfaction.

This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of November 19, 2021.

EY Global Delivery Services (EY GDS) is establishing a new global service centre in Budapest, where services related to tax consultancy will be in focus. The Budapest centre of EY GDS will primarily support EY companies operating in EMEIA countries. By the end of 2024, the company is planning to hire 500 employees to the new headquarters, in connection with which it will implement a training programme in the value of more than EUR 2 million.

EY GDS is an important element of EY's leading services.

EY, which has been present in Hungary since 1993, has decided to establish a new Budapest Global Service Centre. The company plans to hire 500 employees to the new centre by the end of 2024. Services related to tax consultancy will be in the focus of activity. In connection with the establishment of the new centre, the company will implement a training programme with 282 participants in the amount of approximately HUF 770 million.

The Budapest centre of EY GDS will primarily support EY companies operating in EMEIA countries. The office in Budapest is the fifth European office of GDS, which is an important milestone for the expansion on the continent.

As part of the GDS tax team, colleagues of EY GDS Hungary will work closely with EY's international associates, having access to company assets and network, in order to help global customers beyond Hungary in comprehensive business and tax issues.