September 10th, 2018
10/9/2018
CCC (Competence Call Center), a leading BPO in Europe has opened a new office in Riga, with plans to hire 300 employees. Named CCC Riga Digital Services, SIA, the move comes on the heels of CCC's 20th anniversary and summer CCC Convention, where more than 150 business partners, customers and friends came to the Gloriette in Schönbrunn Palace Park in Vienna to toast two decades of service revolution.
On the back of its expansion into Finland's public sector, Visma Labs Riga is expanding beyond 150 employees. To be completed in September 2018, Visma Group and Aditro have signed an agreement whereby Visma acquires 100 percent of the shares of Aditro Public Oy in Finland.
Aditro Public and Visma combined will be a leading provider of Human Resource Management and Financial Management System solutions in the Finnish market. The acquisition includes the public sector HRM solution, Personec HR, as well as the digital Financial Management System, Wintime, and its customer base in the private and public sector. "Finland is an important market for Visma. This acquisition increases the competitiveness and ability to develop best of breed solutions to new and existing customers. Visma is already a market leader in the public sector market in Norway and Sweden and we are looking forward to strengthening our position in the public sector market in Finland”, Øystein Moan, CEO Visma, says. Aditro Public Oy’s revenue amounted to 22,7 million euros in 2017 and the company employs 153 professionals in Espoo, Jyväskylä and Tampere. Aditro Public will be named Visma Public Oy and it will become a new business unit in the Enterprise division. Mari Eklund, Managing Director of Aditro Public Oy, will continue as Managing Director of Visma Public Oy. "The market in Finland is facing a challenging and necessary gradual transition to cloud-based solutions. This acquisition significantly strengthens our focus on offering sustainable solutions to our customers now and in the future. As Visma is sharing Aditro Public’s strategic thoughts, I am confident that the acquisition will lead to increased possibilities for both employees and customers”, says Eklund. Aditro Public Oy is a professional provider of HR, payroll and financial solutions to the public sector in Finland and financial solutions to the enterprise sector. Latvian FinTech buys Colorado bank
10/9/2018
The owners of Latvian payments firm Transact Pro have acquired a small Colorado bank, promising to overhaul it for the 21st century. Mark Moskvin and Maxim Yaroshewsky have bought Colorado National Bank (CNB) for an undisclosed fee and also put $2 million into the bank to boost its capital position.
Moskvin, who is the majority shareholder, founded Latvia's Transact Pro in 2004, offering online payment acceptance and processing services, as well as debit card issuance. In 2007, he brought in Yaroshewsky from DnB Nord Banka as COO and minority shareholder. Says Moskvin: "Today we finalised a two year process to acquire a bank with over a century of history in its name. Our knowledge and experience will help to build innovative new banking services for the bank that will transform it into a modern bank for the 21st century." The new owners have put together a board of directors and have retained John Sprengle, the former president and chief credit officer of CNB, to act as a "point of contact" for customers. DNB Bank ASA Customer Care Center in Latvia continues to expand, with its move to larger office premises in Riga, specifically the building Jauna Teika. DNB's CCC now employs 300 Norwegian-speaking talents serving the bank’s clients in Norway.
Announced back in May, Webhelp is actively integrating its acquisition of top multilingual nearshore firm Runway BPO, with HQ in Riga. Runway brings an additional nine multilingual centres and 1,000 people across Latvia and new countries for Webhelp; Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Spain to the Group, as well as additional expertise in not just sectors such as travel and consumer goods but also activities such as accounting, IT, and HR outsourcing, complementing Webhelp’s existing portfolio perfectly.
Runway celebrates its 15-year anniversary this year and has enjoyed strong growth under the leadership of its founder Nils Sundling and CEO Uldis Prieditis. The team responsible for the company’s success will remain in place to ensure the expertise, contacts and local knowledge are maintained and harnessed to maximise the opportunities for development in the Nordic region and across Europe. Frédéric Jousset, co-founder of Webhelp, said:“Runway is an excellent business with a strong track record of delivering first-class customer experience on behalf of Scandinavian and international clients. We are very excited about joining forces with the company, its management team and employees, to expand Webhelp’s global footprint and support the company in the Scandinavian market with the resources available from our group organisation and investors. Uldis Prieditis, CEO of Runway BPO, said: “Our ambition is now to expand internationally. The deal with Webhelp Group is a perfect fit for the company.” This acquisition is part of Webhelp’s strategy to actively pursue geographical expansion as well as reinforce its sectorial expertise, and will allow Webhelp to offer its clients services from four new countries, each with strong multilingual capabilities. IT Services Hungary (ITSH), the largest ICT provider and employer in Hungary, has moved into a new office of 17,000 square metres. ITSH employs more than 4700 people. In addition to Budapest, the firm has offices in Debrecen, Pécs and Szeged.
Norway’s Yara International, one of the world’s largest providers of fertilizers and crop nutrition solutions, has announced plans to open a logistics-focused European Business Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. The centre is going to occupy a unique place in the company structure, with no counterparts across the world. The company intends to hire around 250 professionals for a wide range of positions – from transport management to customer support.
Before choosing Vilnius for this expansion project, Yara was considering several other locations in Europe. “We were especially careful when selecting the location for this Business Centre, as it will become a crucial operational Supply Chain node in our European delivery network, responsible for coordinating the delivery of products to all our customers across Europe” says Pablo Barrera Lopez, Executive Vice President in Yara International. “To understand the importance of the Vilnius centre, bear in mind that every single order and every single shipment in Europe will have to be managed by our Lithuanian colleagues. This is a huge responsibility, but we are confident that our latest addition to the Yara family will be fit for the task.” According to Mantas Katinas, director general of Invest Lithuania, Yara’s decision shows that the Global Business Centre (GBS) segment in Lithuania is becoming more diverse and mature. Currently, there are more than 70 global business services centres in the country, which employ 15,000 specialists, three times more than five years ago. At the same time, the industry is evolving with every new company that sets up in Lithuania. “Lithuanian specialists working in GBS centres are trusted with tasks that are not just complex but also crucial for the businesses of their parent companies,” Mr Katinas states. “Now, the GBS community is joined by one of the leaders of the agricultural industry, which puts another seal of approval on the Lithuanian talent pool. It is significant that the country will have another channel to showcase its historically strong competencies in the fields of transport and logistics.” The planned Business Centre will not only strengthen the country’s position on the GBS map but will also help Lithuania to take its logistics competencies to the next level, believes Virginijus Sinkevičius, Lithuania‘s Minister of Economy. “Last year, the logistics services sector in Lithuania grew by attracting foreign investors with a focus on engineering and logistics automation. Yara’s decision to open a first-of-its-kind for Lithuania transport management Business Centre sheds light on a new niche in the industry and further expands the competencies of the logistics sector, while creating more opportunities for growth,” the Minister of Economy says. Founded in 1905 to solve emerging famine in Europe, Yara has a worldwide presence with more than 17,000 employees and operations in over 60 countries. In 2017, Yara reported revenues of 9.8 EUR billion. Shared Service Centers - soon the second biggest employer in Slovakia with over 60,000 people - how did it get there and where is it heading?
The first shared services centers (SSCs) started to appear in Slovakia at the beginning of the new millennium. Since then, more than 40 shared services centers have become part of an evolving community and they nowadays represent a significant industry sector in our country. SSCs create job opportunities for more than 30,000 skilled and educated people with a double the average salary of the Slovak economy, pay more than three million euro a year on taxes and levies to the state, and thus significantly affect the economy in a positive way. Thanks to more than 15 years of experience and dynamic growth, the centers located in Slovakia have been given more and more sophisticated tasks, which tend to transform from simple and transactional activities into tasks with a higher added value. SSCs as an industry are turning from very operational and regional to global enterprise services. We do not employ people to work with Excel sheets like many without the knowledge might think. We create accounting reports for parent or affiliated companies, develop or manage software solutions or marketing activities and support clients all over the world with their day-to-day business activities. Our organizations are either in the process of growth, standardization or already using advanced efficiency tools - automation and robotics. Many of the centers have started to, or have the ambition to, establish co-centers of excellence. More than 60 % of SSCs are well-known brands of the service sector - consulting services, IT & telecom services. A third belongs to the manufacturing industry, and a fourth covers the high-tech & electronics sector. 15 % is taken by software development, 86 % of all services fall within advanced Customer Operations including Sales, Fulfillment, Tech Support and Customer Care, Financial Services and IT services. We are growing in each possible way. Slovakia is one of the countries with the highest share of people with secondary education in the EU. Qualified workforce is thus logically one of the reasons that international companies see as an attractive element for setting up a center here. Low fluctuation rate, language skills or the strategic position in the time zone are other advantages of our market. In 2016, the Slovak Government approved an action plan to proactively support the development and expansion of strategic and business centers in Slovakia. This was the first integrated conceptual document including 21 measurements divided into three main areas: ensuring sufficient manpower, creating environment that supports development of SSCs and seeking and active supporting of new investments. This was an important milestone for all of our organizations. SSCs in Slovakia have also the opportunity to join a business association called the Business Service Center Forum, that brings together most companies in the sector and tries to commonly work around their interests. To be able to grow in the changing business environment, we continue to be involved in discussions with the local government and Slovak universities to define the new framework of cooperation for the future. Especially when knowing that the Ministry of Economy predicts that by 2020, the SSC sector will be the second biggest in Slovakia, employing over 60,000 people. We will need new investors and we will need to expand our existing activities. For this, administrative restrictions need to be removed, the position of Slovakia in the Doing Business ranking needs to improve, a continuous monitoring of legislation needs to be in place and cooperation with the private sector shall be on a better level. These are topics that the companies involved in the Business Service Center Forum regularly talk about and bring up for discussions with the representatives of government and academia. I hope we will see more organizations joining us so that we can represent a full image of what SSCs in Slovakia stand for, need and can offer for cooperation and mutual development of our country. Paul Burt is Managing Director at IBM International Services Centre s.r.o. Originally published in Connection, the magazine published by AmCham Slovakia Citi takes 1st place, Lionbridge 2nd, and CBRE 3rd at SSC Charity Beach Volleyball Tournament
2/9/2018
The 2nd annual SSC Charity Beach Volleyball Tournament was held 23 August at Monta Beach Volleyball club in Warsaw. Teams competing included CBRE, Dentons BSC, Citi with 2 teams, RBS, Lionbridge, TMF, CIMA, and SSC Heroes. In a hotly contested final, Citi took 1st place, Lionbridge 2nd, and CBRE 3rd. RBS's Neil Walker won Trophy for "Best Attitude" and Citi's Iga Olszewska for "Top Female Player".
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has expanded its BCG Gamma wing into Poland. The firm has ambitious goals for its data science consulting business, with a target to have between 30-40 people working in the practice by the end of next year.
Analysis of large data sets, big data, is today dubbed as the new oil. By leveraging insights from intelligent automation, organisations can unlock previously unrealised value and productivity. This can be either in the back office, including a more streamlined operations, more efficient compliance or a more effective strategic workforce planning, and in client facing functions, such as sales & marketing, who can ramp up commercials through better targeting and pricing strategies. Using techniques such as artificial intelligence or machine learning, companies can better predict customer behaviour and preferences, and support decision-making when planning new products or services. The trend is lifting spending on data science to record heights. According to one estimate, by Gartner, the value of the data science services market has increased by 22% over the past year, with double digit growth earmarked for the years to come. Against this backdrop, global consulting firm The Boston Consulting Group established its own data science consultancy practice – BCG Gamma – to sit alongside its other practices for among others strategic advisory (BCG), innovation and venturing (BCG Digital Ventures), IT architecture and solutions (BCG Platinion) and design and digital marketing (MAYA, acquired in July 2017). “Gains from data analytics can be substantial, easily representing 1% to 3% of company turnover,” said Sylvain Duranton, a Paris-based partner at BCG who leads BCG Gamma globally together with Los Angeles-based partner Shervin Khodabandeh. For one client, a telecommunications company, BCG Gamma helped the management team achieve more than $10 billion in savings through a redesigned strategy for its internet broadband build-out, while in another engagement, BCG’s data science consultants helped a retailer increase its profit improvement by 50% from footprint resizing using loyalty data. BCG Gamma’s most mature practices are in the US in North America, and France, Germany, and the UK in Europe. Now, as the company further pushes for growth in the data science realm, the consultancy has established a practice in Warsaw. “We chose Warsaw mainly because of access to exceptional talents. Poland educates both fine mathematicians and computer engineering specialists, and BCG Gamma needs a combination of these competences,” said a recruiter at BCG in Eastern Europe. Recruitment is well underway for BCG Gamma in Poland – the firm has set the target of ramping up the workforce to between 30-40 professionals at the end of 2019. The practice is seeking university students with advanced degrees in data science, and experienced professionals with advanced analytics backgrounds at leading corporations in industry or at analytics services firms. |
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