ACQ has awarded its Company of the Year - North America to Integreon. ACQ talks to Liam Brown, President and CEO at Integreon about how the firm saw the credit crisis as an opportunity for growth.
“I have been President and CEO since 2001, during which time we’ve grown the company from 10 associates to about 2,000 worldwide today. Along the way, we’ve built a strong management team, which allows me to focus on strategy, acquisitions, investor and media relations, and key customers.”
Integreon provides knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) services to law firms, financial institutions and corporations, transforming their ‘Middle Office’ and allowing their managers and professionals to focus on their ‘highest and best use.’ Our customers include many AmLaw 100 and UK top 50 law firms, almost all of the global investment banks, several top-tier private equity firms and hedge funds, as well as many Fortune 100 and FTSE 100 corporations.
“We offer KPO services to legal and financial professionals at law firms, investment banks and corporate legal departments: Research KPO includes market research and business intelligence for corporations, and analytics for financial institutions. Legal KPO includes e-discovery, litigation document review, and contract drafting and review for law firms and corporate legal departments. Document KPO includes creating legal documents for lawyers and pitch books for investment bankers. Finally, Business Services include other support services such as accounting, IT or HR services.”
Integreon is the only ‘industrial scale’, global, integrated, multi-service KPO that offers a full range of knowledge services including onsite, onshore, or offshore, moreover Integreon believe they are the largest KPO in the world.
“Our domain expertise and proprietary processes and technologies distinguish Integreon from business process outsourcing (BPO) and IT outsourcing (ITO) competitors. Financial and legal professionals prefer to work with proven domain specialists. Meeting the exacting service demands of bankers and lawyers requires deep expertise, which we provide through small teams of professionals, using processes tailored for each customer and our own custom software tools. In contrast, large teams repeating similar, generic tasks deliver call centre and IT services. Big BPO and ITO companies find it challenging to recruit, train, manage and retain law and business school graduates who want a career path as a professional.
“Our scale and global footprint distinguishes us from niche KPO competitors. Our customers demand operational expertise, business continuity, and world-class information security. We operate ISO 9000 quality system certified and ISO 27001 information security system certified delivery centres in the UK, US, India, and the Philippines. Our global footprint ensures business continuity and enables ‘follow the sun’ operations.
“We are built to last and financially stable. We are 25% owned by management and employees, and 75% owned by Ayala Corporation, a $20 billion public multinational company based in the Philippines. We have multi-year agreements with over a hundred customers across our range of services, which gives us a diversified, recurring revenue base. We have profitably grown sales at a 69% CAGR since 2001 and currently have $80 million annualised turnover.”
Cutting edge
“The achievement that we are most proud is the results we have achieved for our customers.
“Over the last few years we have helped some firms radically transform their professional support infrastructure, service levels and costs. For example we helped build a transformational business services centre in Delhi for Magic Circle law firm Clifford Chance and recently entered into a multi-year, transformational contract with UK law firm Osborne Clarke to assume responsibility for much of the firm’s business services.
“We’re passionate about being the very best at what we do. We have focused on delivering a core set of services to a particular set of clients. We have avoided non-core opportunities and even declined sales when we weren’t absolutely sure we had the capability or scale to deliver at that time”
Integreon’s commitment to its clients has resulted in the majority of the new business coming from client referrals, which reflects the company’s consistency and the high quality service provided by the firm to its clients.
“We have been top-ranked for four years running as the leading overall KPO by The Black Book of Outsourcing, a leading survey of outsourcing customers. We received the 2009 Frost & Sullivan award for Excellence in Knowledge Process Outsourcing. And Integreon’s global management system became a detailed case study in the 2009 book, Managing Across Cultures, by Charlene M. Solomon and Michael S. Schell, published by McGraw Hill.
“We achieved these stellar results by providing rewarding, challenging, and long-term career paths for our associates around the world. Employee turnover in the offshore outsourcing industry is famously high, often over 40%. Even during the booming economy, our offshore employee turnover remained below 20%. In our onshore locations, our annual employee turnover is typically lower than at many of our clients, at less than 5%.”
The glass half full
“Like most companies, we had some bumps in 2008. During the year we lost a few long standing clients like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers for obvious reasons but fortunately, we anticipated a recession in January 2008 and so started profit improvement initiatives in Q1 08.
“Due to our quick actions we finished 2008 with over 30% growth over 2007 - and because of our early focus on costs, our profits tripled.”
Integreon saw the credit crisis as an opportunity for the company, taking advantage of goods investments that helped grow their core business.
“We recently moved quickly to acquire a distressed asset, Onsite3, a major US e-discovery vendor (in the UK, it is called e-disclosure). That acquisition achieved several of our strategic Legal KPO technology and service objectives at a reasonable price, in contrast to the historically stratospheric valuations of e-discovery companies.”
2009
“In 2009, we have seen companies and law firms emerging from their state of shock over the sudden economic downturn in late 08.
“While outsourcing programs reduce expenses and improve service, they take effort to launch, and with their ‘house on fire’, few firms were focused on any new initiative that didn’t immediately cut costs. With managers adjusted to the new economic reality, they are looking to make improvements at the heart of the way they operate. Consequently, we see increased interest in our services, especially ‘transformative outsourcing.’
“For example, in early 2009 one of our global investment banking clients asked us to take over all of its onsite research support for its investment bankers. And recently we have taken over the research and document support services for the lawyers of a major European law firm.”
“This year we are aiming for almost 90% growth, we have just expanded our Legal KPO offerings with an acquisition and some major customer wins in early 2009. We also plan to expand our Research KPO business this year.”
For the complete survey results from ACQ Finance magazine, click here.
Integreon contact:
Ron Friedmann
Senior Vice President
Marketing
+1 703-527-2381
+1 202-904-4076
ron.friedmann@integreon.com