Consulting and BPO
Compare and contrast these snippets of news.
First up is another local government consulting acquisition where Tribal has bought again. This time it’s RSe, whose 30-or-so people do a little bit of strategy consulting for a lot of local authorities. Financial details aren’t available but, for the purposes of this blog, let’s take Tribal’s equally recent acquisition of Helm, whose 82 people went for £21m.
Then look at BPO. HCL, an Indian outsourcer, has just bought a unit of Liberata, the UK BPO outfit. Liberata Financial handles the life policies of Sun Life, AXA and Barclays, among others. It has 800 people, £30m revenue and an order book of over £250m. The cost to HCL? About £1m, say reports from India.
Five years ago private equity, such as General Atlantic, Liberata’s owner, was pouring money into BPO; consultancy was ignored, derided as unbankable. That looks to have been the wrong call.
