The shared services unit of the Dutch financial services giant ING Group in the Philippines anticipates adding some 700 more seats to its knowledge-process outsourcing (KPO)operations.
This was learned on Tuesday from Cees Ovelgonne, country manager of its Philippine unit, who said its workforce could reach 700 this year, as the institution moves to a bigger shared services center in Bonifacio Global City in Taguig.
“We expect to reach some 700 people [from 540 currently] this year. Our four floors will soon be full. We want to move to the more high-end services [and] not just transaction processes, but have some financial analysis and interpretation of results to be outsourced,” Ovelgonne said in a news briefing.
The services provided by its in-house center in Manila are mainly on process management, information technology and support services.
Most KPO services are still being done at the ING head offices.
The ING business shared services offer support to some of ING’s wholesale banking branches in Asia, such as Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and the Philippines.
Some of the support services it offers include processing services for lending, financial markets, bank treasury and trade finance, payments, static data management and reconciliations.
ING Bank’s Manila unit is primarily engaged in fixed-income asset and mergers and acquisition advisory services.
The Manila unit was established in 2013, the first among three, set up by the financial institution.
The Netherlands-based bank has over 51,000 employees worldwide and has presence in over 40 countries.
The bank ended with profits worth nearly €5 billion last year.
In 2016 the entire information technology business-process management
industry proved a significant contributor to the country’s local output, or GDP.
The industry is seen growing 8.2 percent between 2016 and 2022, or some $20.4 billion by 2022.
The contact-center industry is a substantial contributor.
Emerging growth sectors within the industry include human-resource outsourcing and KPO services for analytics, legal, research and management, among other areas.