COLLEGE-educated Filipinos can look forward to more employment opportunities at the newly established Philippine back offices of New York, New York-based American International Group Inc. (AIG) and McLean, Virginia-based Capital One Financial Corp.
“The new business services activities here of both AIG and Capital One will surely help provide well-paying jobs to some of our college graduates who are still out of work,” said Pasig City Roman Romulo.
Romulo is counting on large American corporations to continue to drive jobs creation in the Philippine business process outsourcing (BPO) sector in the months ahead.
“To many Western, mostly US-based global corporations, outsourcing to the Philippines is no longer just about access to lower-cost, college-educated, fluent English-speaking labor,” he said.
“To these global enterprises constantly looking for ways to drive innovation, outsourcing has become part of a conscious strategy to harness the young and highly creative human capital of the Philippines,” Romulo said.
Romulo is House higher and technical education committee chairman, and a key backer of the BPO industry.
He is also author of the Data Privacy Act, which has helped to encourage outsourcing to Manila by assuring the confidentiality of personal details collected by BPO firms from clients and stored in computer systems.
Both AIG Shared Services-Business Processing Inc. and Capital One Philippines Support Services Corp. are based at the Filinvest Corporate City in Alabang, Muntinlupa City.
AIG Shared Services is now recruiting account directors, operations managers, team leaders, finance and accounting associates, call center associates, business process engineers, workforce managers and forecasters, trainers and quality analysts.
They are expected to help provide world-class support services to AIG’s businesses around the globe.
Established in 1919, AIG offers a wide array of insurance and financial services in more than 130 countries. With over 63,000 employees worldwide, AIG generated $65.65 billion in revenues in 2012.
Meanwhile, Capital One Philippines lends support services to its parent firm, a diversified financial services company that provides credit card, home, auto and commercial loans in America.
Capital One is also the seventh largest bank holding company in U.S. by deposits, and the biggest provider there of Internet-only banking services.
Founded in 1994, Capital One has a staff of almost 40,000 in America, and generated some $23.8 billion in revenues in 2012.
Many global corporations have transferred some their non-core, labor-intensive and information technology-enabled business services jobs to the Philippines.
They have either put up back offices in Manila, or contracted out the jobs to dozens of independent multinational BPO providers operating in the Philippines, such as Accenture plc, Convergys Corp., TeleTech Holdings Inc., Stream Global Services Inc., and Sitel Worldwide Corp.
The BPO industry in the Philippines is projected to produce $25 billion in revenues and directly employ 1.3 million Filipinos by 2016. (PR)