Scope International: StanChart's Back-End

Scope came into being in 2001 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Standard Chartered Bank, UK, after the latter took over ANZ Grindlay. The scale of operations at Scope make it one of the biggest banking BPOs of its kind in India. It employs close to 3,300 people and the processes have migrated from 54 countries and are done within 23 different processing units spread across a 5-lakh-sq.ft facility with a capacity of 5,000 plus seats. The processes range from transaction processing, IT support, help desks, HR, financial, reporting services, treasury operations, messaging, and global reconciliation.

What makes Scope stand out is that a significant portion of its work is done out of Chennai. For instance, processing units like the financial shared service center and trade are the biggest of its kind within the group. For Standard Chartered, the Scope facility is a critical knowledge center and employs about 10% of the group's global workforce. The year 2003-04 has been a year of consolidation for Scope and according to company sources, the major challenge it faced during the year was keeping pace with recruitment and managing multiple transactions with overlapping deadlines.