Outsourcing’s inhouse con capers

Dazzling performance apart, data security needs cognisance

Picture this: Five friends working in a leading call centre are hit by a masterstroke of genius one fine day (or night, if you would) and decide to swindle the BPO’s customers by siphoning off funds close to half-a-million dollars from end-user accounts into their own, not once or twice, but during the course of four months before being spotted! The idea is nothing shorn of awesome to marvel at in a thriller or a story, but when the rip-off occurs in your own country, in an industry whose progress has been stupendous and a major contributory factor towards the kind of international glory we revel in our servicing standards, it assumes the form of a stark reality that would be imprudent to overlook. If you were as stunned at the magnitude of the crime and the dangerous repercussions the episode could portend if it were to transform into a trend, you know what I’m alluding to – India’s first electronic banking bamboozlement at MphasiS BFL’s outsourcing unit in Pune earlier this year – not another petty fraud but a sensational occurrence in terms of the unprecedented scale it took place on.

Club this incident with incidents in the past such as the infamous Sun newspaper sting operation that showed illicit trading of financial details regarding British citizens, with an undercover journalist acquiring information on a thousand British bank and credit card account-holders for a measly amount of three pounds apiece, or Australian media claiming a call center in Gurgaon had indulged in illegitimate sharing of customer information.

It is a matter of escalating perception that when foreign clients delight in leveraging India’s intrinsic outsourcing cost benefits, they may well be doing so at the risk of information security, more so in the country’s highly aggressive call centre sector, where companies are constantly under pressure to augment the bottomline. I feel that for an industry, which has taken blazing strides thus far, with exports amounting to $5.2 billion in the fiscal 2004-05, and anticipated to increase by more than 40% in the current fiscal year (credit rating agency ICRA projects India’s ITES-BPO sector to reach approximately $12 billion this year, with an employment of 40 lakh professionals!), any digression from the robust brand image in IT that India has carefully nurtured over the years would mean a disaster.

While it may be accurate to state that scams in India’s BPO sector hardly account for a significant proportion if compared to those in the US and the UK, the sector cannot afford to let itself slotted in the notorious bracket and nip its potential in the bud. It is a widely held belief that India’s cyberlaw system, as it stands, focusses to a greater degree on measures to curb breaches in e-commerce, and not much on enforcing data fortification, with an Information Technology Act that was framed five years back and desperately craves revision with the times. What compounds security matters further is the fact that in an entirely white-collar operational segment of industry, any kind of criminal record warehousing is difficult, with the likelihood of nearly every offender being an educated “con-man” from an affluent household.

Nasscom – the apex industry body for IT and IT-enabled services – which initially underplayed fraud occurrences in the sector, has recently announced plans to establish an autonomous self-regulatory organisation, with the objective of implementing policies pertaining to security of data in outsourcing. Measures like instituting cyber labs and expansion of police force dedicated to the field of cyber crime may augur well; I think what is imperative, however, is sufficient training of this force in contemporary aspects of information security violation. It’s improbable that this malaise, due to its very obscure and remote nature, will diminish automatically.

For a nation that prides itself on being a global outsourcing hub, shaking off complacency with regarding to client information safety is of critical importance. For the first time, India’s shining BPO industry will need to take a long, hard look at the security procedures it presently has in order...

Written On:

9/11/2006