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Mr Phaneesh Murthy, Co-Founder, Primentor, addressing presspersons at the launch of Quintant, in Bangalore on Thursday.

BANGALORE, March 6

QUINTANT Services Ltd, a back-office services start-up, has raised $29.8 million as initial funding from investors including its promoters, GMR Group, who would hold a majority stake in the company and Mr Phaneesh Murthy, former head of worldwide sales at Infosys Technologies, among others.

Quintant planned to offer business services provisioning (BSP) by providing value-added services through a combination of business understanding, technology-enabled frameworks and intelligent analysis of data, said the company's President, Mr T.G.Ramesh, the ex-Nortel Saarc chief and co-founder of Bangalore Labs.

Quintant, which plans to focus on banking, insurance, card services and investment banking segments, would create new value opportunities from the boardroom to backroom through business process optimisation and management, he said.

`By offering a combination of technology, offshore delivery, labour arbitrage, process efficiencies, business intelligence and automation, we expect a cost saving for customers between 40 and 50 per cent," Mr Ramesh said.

Quintant, which has opened offices in Bangalore, London, Toronto, Chicago and San Francisco, plans to hire about 75 professionals over the next few months.

It also planned to set up a one lakh sq feet campus in a 10-acre campus in Bangalore and another centre in Europe by end-2003, which would act as a business continuity centre, Mr Ramesh said.

Mr Kiran Kumar Gandhi, Director, GMR Group, said: "BSP is a tremendous business opportunity and India has emerged as a key destination. This is a high potential industry, and with our prior experience in the banking, financial services and insurance sector, we feel BSP is a natural extension."

Quintant has put in a strong management team of nine professionals in place, of which two are ex-Infoscians. The company has roped in Primentor Inc, an advisory services firm floated by Mr Phaneesh Murthy, for providing strategic consulting and service definition.

Mr Murthy said: "There is a crying need for a BSP from India. A BSP requires investment in technology and in process frameworks. The GMR-Quintant combine provides an extraordinary combination of business intelligence, domain expertise, technology and capital."

Commenting on the market potential, Mr Murthy said "I see the market growing at a minimum of 100 per cent annually for the next couple of years at least. At present, the BPO market worldwide is estimated to be around $200 billion. I am very bullish on the BSP-BPO space and in the next 10 years, the BSP-BPO market in India will be bigger than the IT market'.

The Chennai-based Spark Capital, a boutique investment banker, advised the GMR Group on structuring the Quintant deal.

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