The Venture Intelligence Blog

Technology Holdings' client, Allsec Technologies, has completed the acquisition of Retreat Capital Management, a full service mortgage BPO company headquartered in Irvine. Technology Holdings was the exclusive advisor on the transaction. Retreat Capital is an end-to-end provider of loss mitigation and portfolio management services for mortgage lenders, servicers, asset managers and investors. Established by industry professionals with over 25 years in the mortgage and real estate industries, Retreat Capital was created to serve as a single-source solution for reducing costs and mitigating loss at every stage of the mortgage process, from predictive modeling to processing through REO management. Allsec Technologies is a leading Business Process Outsourcing service provider headquartered in Chennai, whose investors include The Carlyle Group. Allsec's stock exchange announcement is here For additional information, please contact: Vivek Subramanyam Managing Director vivek@technolog...

In the wake of IT Product companies like Xerox and Dell buying their way into the IT Services world through multi-billion dollar deals, Reuters - quoting industry analysts - has an article that lists significantly India-based companies like Cognizant, WNS, ExlServices among the list of "attractive acquisition candidates". (Other companies on the list include Sapient, CSC and Amdocs.) Possible acquirers could be tech giants such as IBM , Hewlett-Packard or Cisco, European players like BT or Deutsche Telekom and Asian companies like Hitachi , Fujitsu or NEC, analysts said. "There's definitely going to be some strategic acquisitions -- there's no doubt about that," Goldman Sachs analyst Julio Quinteros said. "It's just, how much are you willing to pay? And would you rather wait for the market to come back a little bit?" The recurring revenue stream that IT services firms have gives them more visibility and stability. ... One group of services fi...

Business Today has an article on how the Essar Group's outsourcing arm, Aegis, has acquired its way into the top league of Indian BPOs. The ITES onslaught can be traced back to 2003, when the Ruias made their first acquisition, of Aegis Communication Group in the US for $28 million. Another 12 followed in the years to come. Aegis was struggling with some $22 million in losses. The takeover trail hasn’t ended: Last fortnight, the Ruias picked up CCN Group of South Africa for $30 million. Today, Aegis BPO is valued at a billion dollars, with some 35,000 employees and 32 global locations. It is also profitable, say company officials. “Our ambition is to grow as big as we can in the services space… we are a value investor,” says Ruia. ...The core of Essar’s ITES portfolio for some time to come will be BPO, which had revenues of half a billion dollars last year, and which the company claims is the fastest-growing BPO in the world (at a rate of 50 per cent as against the Indian BPO indu...