Fiji as a business process outsourcing sector provides a wide range of benefits for clients in the Australian and New Zealand market, as incentives in the 2021-2022 National Budget strengthens the country’s lucrativeness.
The Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, during a webinar on comparing Fiji’s BPO industry with Philippines, said Fiji had been largely a tourism based economy, but in the past number of years there was a growing BPO sector, which they had provided various incentives for in terms of tax breaks etc.
“But it has meant in the past 18 months or so from a fiscal perspective, we have carried out a number of significant changes whether its wholesale reduction on tariff rates, in terms of getting rid of certain taxes and getting rid of things like business license requirements which is very cumbersome and bureaucratic and we’re impeding on businesses to thrive,” he said.
“As part of the reforms also as announced in the recent budget we have again looked at the BPO sector.
“As you know this meeting is probably also being facilitated by the fact that we provided $200,000 to the BPO Council to do more marketing as far as their business is concerned.”
Mr Sayed-Khaiyum added they also provided a number of tax incentives to a number of BPO companies, such as a 20 year tax holiday in Fiji.
He said they had also provided a tax holiday for companies that were willing to invest in infrastructure.
“So we’ve given them tax holidays to build infrastructure for companies that do want to come in and operate BPO.
“We have seen a lot of interest in that respect and again they get various tax holidays depending on the level of investment.”
He said people in the country also spoke fluently in English as they had neutral accents therefore there wasn’t a need to spend money to get them to change their accents.
“I think again the fact that the proximity to markets, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland etc, is obviously there and you can very quickly reach Fiji in a matter of three or four hours.
“We have also in the past number of years brought in the liberalisation of the telecom sector, cost in fact has come down in respect to data, we have also invested in the next gen for the southern cross cable in terms of providing the infrastructure, in terms of capacity.
“So I think obviously there is a number of incentives in place and I think its all coming together and we are obviously quite here happy to facilitate.”
Fiji had a fairly savvy young population which was very eager to work and they were attracted to the ICT sector in itself according to Mr Sayed-Khaiyum.
“I think there is an ability to carry out a lot more sophisticated type of work in the BPO ambit, whether its filing tax returns, those are the kind of things we need to look at and move on to because a lot of for example Fijian qualified accountants also have the CPA qualifications from Australia.
“So a lot of that more sort of nuanced niche sort of market type work can also be done by our citizens rather than simply for example answering phone calls or basic data processing.
“I think we have the ability to move on to the next stage,” he said.
Brad Hagstrom, chief operating officer at Harmoney, an Australian company that has been outsourcing their contact centre operations and other functions to Mindpearl in Fiji since 2014, said they had sufficient infrastructure to support the high internet that they needed for downloads and uploads and so forth, as the phone calls were VoIP operated as well.
“We’ve never had any issues with downtime, with the exception of the recent example of having to move everyone out of the office to home and set them up on dongles but even that has been pretty smooth in the scheme of things.
“Pricing wise its similar to what you might have experienced elsewhere in the region, its probably better than 50 per cent of new Zealand labour cost depending on the roles that you are looking for but very competitive,” he said.
Mr Hagstrom added they had transacted over two billion loans process.
“We have up to 30,000 customer interactions per month be that by chat email, phone call, outbound call, through all that we have to comply across Australia and New Zealand with about 21 pieces of legislation.
“We try and automate and control as much of that as we possibly can but when you get into a phone conversation obviously it can become a challenge, so we have a high degree of compliance and audit.
“In the time we’ve been up there we have detected very few breaches extremely rare maybe one a year and they are in inadvertent mistakes.”
He said they were supporting five times zones across Australia and New Zealand and were also multiproduct as well including lenders and borrowers as some of the key results which they had was their attrition rates.
“When we first off shored the 75 people in Manila back in 2011, at the end of training two weeks later we had lost 40 per cent of those people that had started the training and then another 40 per cent not too long after that.
“Attrition rate up there has been 3 per cent and its zero per cent last year which was really pleasing, last two years I think it’s just one person so it’s very low.”
This meant the company had significantly lower recruitment training costs and retraining all the time became a challenge according to Mr Hagstrom.
“You will always see performance dip which is concerning as a business when you are trying to scale,” he said.
BPO Council in Fiji executive director Sagufta Janif said Fiji had become the outsourcing destination choice for many Australian companies.
“Fiji has been operating as an outsourcing destination since 2002 with ANZ Bank, pioneering our Fiji operations hub and this quickly caught the attention of major BPO’s like Mindpearl, Packleader and our Pacific Office Centercom amongst the others,” she said.
“The services our BPO offers range from contact centre operations IT help desk, accounting and finance HR and recruitment and the industries our BPOs are serving include online and retail financial services teleco, energy recruitment and many more.
“Business of all shapes and sizes outsource to Fiji, you might recognise brands like iSelect, Rentokil, Spotlight Retail Group being the major ones currently outsourcing their business operations Fiji.”
Ms Janif added in both destinations companies would be spending approximately $A10 to $A15 per hour which was an all inclusive rate.
“Looking at this rate your company could save about 70 per cent on employment cost.
“Our literacy rate is also quite similar, with Fiji at 99.1 per cent and Philippines at 98 per cent although the time zones may seem similar it is worth noting that when you outsource to Fiji your team in Fiji will start processing documents serving your customers and attending to requests at 6 am Australian time.
“Whereas in the Philippines the start time would be around 10 to 11 am which may impact your productivity so if your business needs 24/7 support Fiji can also be a great option for that,” she said.
