FOUNDER
The Man Who Gave 108 Exams: Raman Roy, Father of Indian BPO
Over the course of his life, Raman Roy sat for about 108 professional exams.
It wasn’t because he loved exams. He had simply set his sights on one thing: a decent job at a multinational. So, paper after paper, he worked toward it.
And he got it.
His career began at TCS, and from there he moved to American Express. It was in the early 1990s, in the offices of Amex, that a simple question was asked: could some of the company’s accounting work be done from India?
Raman didn’t just consider the question. He built the answer.
The team he assembled became one of India’s first offshore back offices. It cost 40 to 50 percent less than the alternative, and the quality held up. For a company weighing cost against quality, here was a rare surprise: it didn’t have to choose.
Word travelled. Soon another giant came calling: General Electric.
In 1995, Raman made the move to GE, where he was asked to build the same thing all over again. This time he worked alongside Pramod Bhasin, and the operation they created would later become Genpact.
By then, he had done something few people could claim. He had built back offices for two of the world’s biggest companies.
But building them for others was only half the story.
The Leap
In 2000, Raman decided to build one for himself. He called it Spectramind.
The timing could hardly have been worse. The dot-com bust was underway, and few people believed in outsourcing from India. This was not a season for betting on a new company with an unproven idea.
Yet by the end of its first full year, Spectramind had 2,700 employees and 7 clients.
Then, in July 2002, Wipro bought a majority stake, valuing the company at about $131 million. The deal mattered far beyond one balance sheet. It helped bring investors back into India’s struggling BPO industry, at a time when the industry badly needed them.
Under Wipro, the team grew from 2,700 to more than 8,000 people in just over a year. Raman ran Wipro Spectramind until 2005.
Once More
And then came the moment when most people slow down.
Raman started again.
His new company was Quatrro, named from the Latin word for “four.” It was, as he put it, his fourth adventure.
Today, he is widely called the “father of Indian BPO,” an industry that has grown to employ millions of Indians.
Ask him how a career like that came to be, and he doesn’t talk about grand plans. He once called being a serial entrepreneur a “pleasant accident.”
What Raman Roy Teaches Us
A job can be your training ground for building something of your own.
Doing it once for someone else is practice. Doing it for yourself is the real test.
Build what you know best, and build it again, better.
One idea, executed well, can create a whole industry.
Some people take the exam. Raman Roy wrote the paper.