What is What is business process outsourcing??
What is business process outsourcing?Business process outsourcing (BPO) is hiring a third-party provider to run a defined business function like customer support, payroll, or IT helpdesk. The provider takes ownership of the people, process, and technology, and bills per seat, transaction, or fixed fee.
BPO is a subset of outsourcing that focuses on repeatable, high-volume work. When those functions move to a lower-cost country, the setup is called offshoring.
Common categories include customer support, finance and accounting, HR, IT helpdesk, and other back-office work — plus higher-value knowledge processes like analytics or research.
Key takeaways BPO shifts a defined function to an external provider under a written contract.
Pricing models fall into per-FTE, per-transaction, outcome-based, or hybrid buckets.
The Philippines and India lead global BPO delivery through 2025.
Cost drives many deals, but access to talent and 24/7 coverage matter just as much.
A service level agreement sets the quality bar and remedies for the relationship. How it worksBPO works by transferring a defined process to a specialized vendor under a written contract. You keep strategic control; the provider owns staffing, tools, and daily execution.
Pricing usually follows one of four models — per-seat, per-transaction, outcome-based, or a hybrid mix.
Companies choose BPO for three reasons: lower cost, access to specialized talent, and the ability to convert fixed headcount into variable operating expense. Most enterprise buyers combine two or three of these goals in the same contract.
Most engagements start with discovery. The client documents the process, sets KPIs, and defines escalation paths. The provider then hires, trains, and shadows before going live — typically 6 to 12 weeks.
The pricing model shapes risk. Per-seat fees favor steady work; outcome-based fees push accountability onto the provider. Most contracts also include a service level agreement that ties bonuses or penalties to defined performance targets.
Model
How you pay
Best for Per FTE (seat)
Fixed monthly rate per agent
Steady-volume work like inbound support Per transaction
Set fee per call, ticket, or invoice
Variable-volume back-office tasks Outcome-based
Tied to a KPI like CSAT or collections
Mature processes with clean metrics Hybrid
Base FTE rate plus variable bonus
Long-term partnershipsContracts usually run 2 to 5 years with annual price adjustments. Buyers should build off-boarding clauses upfront so the process can move back in-house or to another vendor if performance slips.
The upside is clear: cost reduction of 30-60%, faster staffing, and 24/7 coverage using follow-the-sun teams. The trade-off is management overhead, cultural distance, and dependency on a single provider for critical work.
Provider selection now weighs security posture and data residency more than a decade ago.
GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS obligations flow from the client to the provider. Contracts spell out audit rights, penalty clauses, and breach reporting windows.
Location choice matters. Providers in the Philippines and India deliver English-language support at 40-70% below onshore rates, while nearshoring to Mexico or Colombia buys time-zone alignment. Onshoring stays domestic but costs the most.
ExamplesBPO delivery clusters into three archetypes — call center hubs, knowledge process shops, and nearshore bilingual centers. Global BPO revenue reached USD 347.95 billion in 2024 with a projected 10.05% CAGR through 2035, per Precedence Research.
Buyers often start in the Philippines. English fluency, Filipino traits and values, and Western-facing culture reduce onboarding friction. It remains the top outsourcing destination for voice work heading into 2025.
Philippines call centers. The Philippines IT-BPM sector booked around USD 40 billion in 2024 with about 1.9 million employees, targeting 2.5 million by 2028.
Concentrix, Teleperformance, and TDCX all run major Manila and Cebu call center campuses. See the Top 40 BPO companies in the Philippines and this guide to call centers for hire.
India knowledge process outsourcing. Knowledge process outsourcing firms in Bengaluru and Gurgaon handle equity research, legal review, and analytics for Wall Street. WNS, Genpact, and EXL all posted multi-billion-dollar revenues in 2024.
Latin America customer support. Colombia, Mexico, and Costa Rica attract US fintechs and SaaS platforms wanting Spanish-English bilingual agents. Rankings on Clutch show Bogotá firms among the fastest-growing between 2022 and 2024.
Global finance and IT support. Accenture, IBM, and Cognizant deliver ERP support, cloud operations, and finance-and-accounting from delivery hubs in Poland, Ireland, and India. Their contracts often span 5 to 10 years and blend BPO with technology services.
Enterprise BPO deals are becoming more outcome-linked. Rather than paying per seat, buyers in 2024 increasingly pay for defined KPIs like first-call resolution or completed orders, which pushes performance risk back to the provider.
Related terms Offshoring: the practice of moving business functions to distant, lower-cost countries. Nearshoring: outsourcing to a country in a similar time zone, often for language or cultural fit. Onshoring: keeping outsourced work inside the client's home country. Knowledge Process Outsourcing: outsourcing of higher-value analytical or specialist work such as research or legal review. Call Center: a facility built to handle inbound or outbound customer calls at scale. Back-Office: the non-customer-facing operations that support day-to-day business functions. Service Level Agreement: the contract clause that defines performance targets and remedies for a BPO deal. FAQ What is BPO in simple terms?BPO is when a company hires another business to run a specific function like customer service or payroll. The client sets the outcomes; the provider handles the day-to-day work.
What is the difference between BPO and outsourcing?Outsourcing is the umbrella term for contracting any external provider. BPO is the subset that covers full business functions like call centers, HR, or accounting, usually delivered offshore at scale.
Is BPO only about cost savings?No. Cost is the entry point, but most mature buyers cite access to specialized talent, 24/7 coverage, and scalability as the bigger long-term wins. Cost-only deals tend to churn within 18 months.
Which countries dominate BPO?The Philippines leads voice and English-language customer support. India dominates IT and knowledge process work. Mexico, Colombia, and Costa Rica anchor Latin America's nearshore market for US clients.
What functions do companies outsource most often?Customer support, IT helpdesk, finance and accounting, HR administration, and content moderation lead the pack. Higher-value work like data analytics and legal review is growing fastest.
How do I choose a BPO provider?Match the provider's specialization to your function, check industry references, and shortlist candidates using the Ultimate Guide to Outsourcing.
Explore vetted providers at Outsource Accelerator's BPO Directory
What is Shared Services?
Shared ServicesShared services is an in-house model where one team runs repeatable work, such as finance, HR, IT and procurement, for every business unit from a single center. The parent firm keeps control and payroll, and each unit pays for what it uses.
The idea took hold in the early 1990s, when General Electric and Ford pulled scattered finance teams into single sites to standardize ledgers and cut headcount. Three decades on, the playbook still works — what changed is the scope.
Today a center can absorb almost any rules-based function a corporation runs, from invoice processing to master-data management to first-line IT support. Most large groups also run a hybrid: a captive hub offshore, with selective vendor work layered on top.
Outsource Accelerator has tracked this shift since 2017, and one pattern keeps repeating. Companies that treat shared services as a pure cost play stall around year two. The ones that treat it as a process-redesign program keep compounding savings.
Key takeaways Shared services centralizes back-office work inside the company; outsourcing hands the same work to an outside vendor.
Mature centers report 25–40% lower process costs once consolidation and standardization finish, per Deloitte's 2023 Global Shared Services and Outsourcing Survey.
Most large enterprises run hybrid setups: captive centers in Manila, Krakow or Bengaluru, plus targeted outsourcing on top.
Governance is the make-or-break variable, not location — a center without a business-unit steering committee drifts into order-taking.
Automation sits inside the model rather than replacing it, so staff shift from processing work to exception handling and analytics. How it worksA shared services center (SSC) pulls similar tasks from every business unit into one team that works to a service-level agreement. Work gets standardized, automated where it can be, and charged back per transaction or by subscription.
Most builds move through four stages, and skipping one is the usual reason a program stalls.
Stage
Focus
Typical duration 1. Consolidation
Pull scattered teams into one site, freeze processes
6–12 months 2. Standardization
Single workflows, single tools, single chart of accounts
12–18 months 3. Optimization
Lean, robotic process automation, analytics layered on top
18–36 months 4. Value-add
Center moves from transaction processing to advisory work
36 months+Governance sits with a steering committee drawn from the parent business. The center itself runs on hard measures: cost per invoice, days-to-close, first-contact resolution and customer satisfaction scores.
Headcount economics hold up too. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, business and financial operations roles, which make up the bulk of SSC staffing, are projected to grow 7% through 2033.
Location strategy matters as much as design. A captive center in the Philippines, India, Poland or Costa Rica delivers labor arbitrage of 50–70% against US or UK rates, while keeping staff on the parent's payroll.
Attrition is the quiet risk. Offshore finance and helpdesk roles turn over faster than their onshore equivalents, so mature centers budget for a training bench, clear career ladders and documented processes instead of assuming the first cohort stays put.
Funding models decide behavior. A flat corporate allocation invites business units to over-consume, while per-transaction chargeback makes them curious about their own volumes — and that curiosity drives the second wave of savings.
ExamplesReal programs look nothing like the textbook diagram. The four below span consumer goods, energy and an entire national sector, and each one shows a different reason companies keep this work in-house.
Procter & Gamble Global Business Services: runs finance, HR, IT and facilities for the whole group from hubs in Manila, San José and Newcastle. The center serves roughly 100,000 employees, and Gartner has repeatedly cited it as a benchmark global business services program. Shell Business Operations: five sites, in Manila, Krakow, Chennai, Bengaluru and Kuala Lumpur, cover finance, HR, contracting and customer operations for Shell's upstream and downstream units. The Manila site alone employed more than 5,000 people as of 2024. Unilever Enterprise & Technology Solutions: consolidated 26 separate finance back offices into four global hubs between 2018 and 2023, and reported days-to-close falling from eight days to three across the group. The Philippine IT-BPM sector: the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines reported USD 38 billion in revenue and 1.82 million direct jobs in 2024, with captive centers taking a growing share of new hires.Notice what these programs share. Each standardized before it automated — and each reports to a steering committee with real budget authority, rather than to a single function chasing its own numbers.
Each also sequenced the work. Transactional volume moved first, judgment work followed only once the base was stable, and analytics arrived last. Reverse that order and the center inherits chaos it cannot price.
Related termsShared services sits inside a wider family of operating models, and the differences between them are practical rather than academic. Read these next to place the model accurately against its closest neighbours.
Business Process Outsourcing: third-party vendor delivery, the closest cousin to shared services. Captive Center: a wholly owned offshore site, which is what most modern shared services hubs are. Global Business Services: the evolved form that covers many functions worldwide under one leadership team. Back Office: the function set a center typically absorbs first. Knowledge Process Outsourcing: higher-judgment work that often follows once a center matures. Offshoring: the location-cost lever that makes most captive models pencil out. FAQThe five questions below cover what buyers ask most often about shared services: how it differs from outsourcing, which functions move first, what the model saves, where the centers sit, and whether automation has changed the answer.
How is shared services different from outsourcing?Shared services keeps the team inside the parent company, on its payroll and inside its security perimeter. Outsourcing hands the same work to an external vendor under a contract. Many large groups run both at once.
What functions are usually first into a shared services center?Finance and accounting almost always go first: accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger and payroll. HR transactional work and the IT helpdesk form the typical second wave.
How much does a shared services model actually save?Mature centers report 25–40% lower process costs once standardization and automation are in place. Offshore labor arbitrage adds another 50–70% on the affected roles.
Where are most shared services centers based?The Philippines, India, Poland, Malaysia, Costa Rica and Romania dominate the list. Manila is the largest single hub for English-language finance and customer operations work.
Is shared services still relevant with automation and AI?Yes, because automation moves the work rather than the model, so your people handle exceptions and analytics while software clears the volume.
Ready to benchmark your own center or find a partner to run alongside it? Compare vetted providers in the Outsource Accelerator directory.
What is Finance & Accounting?
Finance & AccountingFinance and accounting is the paired business function that records every transaction, reports the numbers under a recognised standard, and turns them into decisions about cash, tax, and capital. Accounting looks backward at history; finance plans the next move ahead.
Key takeaways F&A pairs backward-looking accounting with forward-looking finance under US GAAP or IFRS.
The global FAO market reached USD 54.79 billion in 2025 and heads to USD 85.92 billion by 2031.
Named delivery hubs cluster in the Philippines, India, Romania, and Argentina.
Buyers outsource transactional work first and keep judgement-heavy tasks in-house.
Cost savings of 40 to 60 percent drive most F&A outsourcing decisions.Every dollar a business earns or spends flows through these two ledgers. Accountants log the entry, close the books, and file returns. Finance teams take that clean data and run scenarios on pricing, hiring, and capital structure.
Outsourced F&A shops now handle the bulk of transactional work — accounts payable, receivables, payroll close, tax filing — while retained staff focus on FP&A and treasury.
Providers price per full-time equivalent, per transaction, or per gain-share, with hybrid pricing now standard for larger engagements.
How it worksThe function splits into two lanes. Accounting captures every transaction, closes the period, and produces the trial balance under US GAAP or IFRS. Finance takes that record, forecasts cash, prices deals, and steers capital toward its highest return.
Lane
Focus
Deliverables
Common tools Accounting
Backward view of transactions
General ledger, statements, tax returns
Xero, QuickBooks Online, NetSuite, Sage Intacct Finance
Forward view of value
Budgets, forecasts, capital plans, treasury reports
Excel, Anaplan, Adaptive InsightsThe two lanes run on different clocks but share one language: US GAAP in the United States or IFRS across most of the rest of the world. Both dictate how revenue is recognised, how leases are booked, and how goodwill gets impaired.
The global finance and accounting outsourcing market reached USD 54.79 billion in 2025, on pace to hit USD 85.92 billion by 2031 at a 7.78% CAGR. Everest Group tracked FAO spend growth up to 10% year on year in 2022.
Buyers cite three motivators. Cost dominates for smaller finance functions moving accounts payable and receivables offshore. Standards fluency drives IFRS-heavy multinationals to hubs that already staff qualified accountants.
Speed rounds out the pitch, with public companies chasing shorter quarter-end close cycles pushing work to teams that run 24-hour follow-the-sun coverage.
Providers tie fees to a service level agreement covering close-cycle days, error rate, and days sales outstanding — the F&A equivalent of a CSAT target in customer experience work.
Governance sits over the top. Steering committees meet monthly, service level penalties trigger at breach, and quarterly business reviews test whether the operating rhythm holds.
When the model works, F&A becomes a shared operating fabric between buyer and provider, not a vendor call.
ExamplesGlobal buyers now split F&A work across a small set of proven delivery hubs and pure-play providers. The names below show what typical engagements look like at scale, with published dates for context.
Delivery footprints span three continents, with buyers picking a hub for language, time zone, and standards fluency.
Genpact spun out of General Electric in 2005 and now runs F&A shops in Bengaluru, Bucharest, and Manila for global manufacturers. Its finance-and-accounting service line remains the single largest contributor to group revenue.
Accenture has picked up long-running F&A engagements with Unilever, Marriott, and BP, mixing on-shore analysts with delivery centres in the Philippines and India. The firm operates dedicated FAO centres in Manila and Bengaluru at scale.
Tata Consultancy Services has handled Nielsen's global finance operations since 2007, closing books for the media measurement giant across 100-plus countries. TCS remains one of the top-three FAO providers by revenue.
Buyers use the same outsourcing, offshoring, and nearshoring playbook — the one that reshaped call center, contact center, help desk, and customer support work a decade earlier. Delivery centres in Manila, Bengaluru, and Buenos Aires now form the F&A backbone.
Related terms Bookkeeping: daily transaction recording that feeds the accounting close. Payroll: the workforce-pay function most F&A providers bundle in. Back office: the broader admin function that houses F&A work. Offshore accounting: outsourced F&A delivered from lower-cost geographies. Business process outsourcing: the parent category F&A sits inside. Knowledge process outsourcing: higher-judgement work like FP&A and treasury. Financial services company: the buyer type with the deepest F&A needs. FAQ What is the difference between finance and accounting?Accounting records what has already happened, from every transaction to every close to every filing. Finance uses that clean data to plan cash, price deals, and steer capital. One looks back; the other looks ahead.
Why do companies outsource finance and accounting?Cost sits at the top of the pitch: offshore F&A teams typically run 40 to 60 percent cheaper than onshore equivalents. Access to scarce skills like IFRS reporting and FP&A modelling comes next. Faster close cycles and 24-hour coverage close out the case.
Which countries dominate finance and accounting outsourcing?The Philippines, India, and Poland handle the largest share of Fortune 500 F&A work. Argentina and Colombia have grown quickly as nearshore options for North American buyers. Romania serves European clients from Bucharest and Cluj.
Is outsourced finance and accounting safe from a compliance standpoint?Yes, when the provider carries SOC 1, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 attestations and the contract locks data residency. Buyers still keep tax filing sign-off and audit sponsorship in-house. The provider executes and the client approves.
How much of the finance function should be outsourced?Most buyers outsource high-volume transactional work like accounts payable, receivables, and payroll close. Judgement-heavy work (treasury, tax strategy, board reporting) stays with retained staff. The split usually lands 70 to 30 in favour of outsourcing.
What tools do outsourced F&A providers use?Cloud accounting platforms dominate the stack: Xero and QuickBooks Online for smaller shops, NetSuite and Sage Intacct for multinationals, with Anaplan layered on for FP&A modelling.
Explore more OA terms and guidance at Outsource Accelerator
What is Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)?
Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a written, step-by-step guide for a task or workflow. It tells anyone doing the job how to complete it, in the right order and to the same standard. Good SOPs make one expert's method the team's baseline.
You'll find SOPs behind almost every well-run outsourcing arrangement. They're the reason a new agent in Manila can handle a ticket the same way a five-year veteran does, and why quality doesn't slip when your account manager goes on leave.
The best SOPs read like a recipe you can hand to someone who's never done the task before. If they can't finish the job with just the document open, the SOP isn't done yet.
Done well, SOPs shrink onboarding time, tighten compliance, and make audits painless. Done badly, they gather dust in a shared drive nobody opens.
Key takeaways SOPs document how a task is done, not just what needs doing.
The best SOPs are short, visual, and updated when the process changes.
They cut onboarding time and reduce errors during handovers.
Compliance-heavy sectors like finance and healthcare require SOPs by law. How it worksAn SOP works by breaking a process into ordered, named steps that anyone with the right role can follow. Each step names four things — actor, action, tool, and acceptable output. The document lives under version control and gets reviewed on a fixed cadence.
Most teams write SOPs in one of three shapes, matched to the complexity of the work.
SOP format
Best for
Typical length Step-by-step checklist
Routine, low-risk tasks
5–15 steps Hierarchical outline
Multi-role processes with sub-tasks
2–5 pages Flowchart
Decision-heavy work with branches
1 page visualAccording to Process.st's SOP format guide, flowchart formats work best when a process forks on customer type, order value, or risk score. Step-by-step checklists cover the bulk of contact-centre and back-office work.
For call-centre work, checklists dominate. For finance-and-accounting outsourcing, hierarchical outlines carry the risk-tiered approvals. Flowcharts fit fraud-review queues where analyst decisions branch.
Every SOP needs four fixed fields: owner, review date, trigger, and success criteria.
The success criteria tie back to the key performance indicator (KPI) the process moves, whether that's first-contact resolution, average handle time, or error rate per 1,000 transactions. KPI.org covers how to set those measures cleanly.
Version control matters more than most teams admit. If an agent is following version 3 while quality assurance audits against version 5, you'll see failed reviews that aren't the agent's fault.
Store SOPs in a single system, timestamp every change, and force a re-read after each update. Regulated sectors, from finance to healthcare, treat SOPs as evidence during audits.
ExamplesSOPs show up wherever consistency pays off — call scripts, refund workflows, security patching, medical intake. In outsourcing, they're the currency that lets a client's internal team hand a process to a Manila or Cebu team and know it'll come back the same.
Contact-centre refund SOP. A large e-commerce brand outsourcing to a Philippine business process outsourcing (BPO) provider typically hands over a refund SOP that pins the maximum discretionary amount, the escalation trigger, and the exact CRM macros to use.
In 2024, most tier-1 BPOs reviewed these refund SOPs quarterly to stay ahead of chargeback rules.
Hospital medication SOP. Under United States Joint Commission standards updated in 2023, hospitals maintain SOPs for high-alert medication administration that require two-nurse verification and time-stamped documentation.
A single skipped step can trigger regulatory action.
Software incident response. A customer support team handling SaaS tickets follows an incident SOP that starts the moment an alert fires: acknowledge in Slack, page the on-call engineer, and post to the status page inside 15 minutes.
The service level agreement (SLA) tracker updates automatically once the incident closes.
Manufacturing safety walkthrough. According to a 2023 Small Business Chronicle piece, factories that codify pre-shift safety walkthroughs into SOPs see fewer OSHA-recordable incidents than those relying on tribal knowledge alone.
Line managers walk the checklist with each incoming shift lead.
Related termsSOPs sit alongside other operating documents that describe how work gets done in an outsourcing context. Understanding where each one starts and stops helps you write cleaner SOPs and avoid overlap with agreements, playbooks, and process maps.
Business process outsourcing (BPO): the delivery model SOPs govern day-to-day. Service level agreement (SLA): the contractual promise SOPs deliver against. Customer support: the function most reliant on SOPs to keep tone and speed consistent. Key performance indicator (KPI): the metric each SOP is meant to move. Quality assurance: the audit function that scores SOP adherence. Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO): higher-skill work where SOPs govern judgement checkpoints, not full workflows. FAQ What's the difference between an SOP and a work instruction?An SOP describes the whole process end-to-end, including who owns each step. A work instruction zooms in on one task inside that process, typically at the click-by-click level. Most teams keep both, linked from the same page.
How often should you review an SOP?Review quarterly for high-change work like fraud rules or product returns, and annually for stable back-office tasks. Trigger an out-of-cycle review whenever a tool, regulation, or process owner changes.
Who should write the SOP?The person doing the job today, edited by whoever will audit it tomorrow. SOPs written by managers alone tend to miss the shortcuts operators actually use, and those shortcuts are usually the reason quality varies.
Do SOPs need to be documents, or can they be videos?Both work. Regulated industries usually require a written master document for audit, but video walkthroughs sit well alongside it for training. Whatever format you pick, version it and give it an owner.
What breaks an SOP fastest?Silent tool changes — a CRM field rename, a new payment gateway, or an approval workflow tweak can invalidate half your SOPs overnight if nobody flags it back to the SOP owner.
See how outsourcing firms structure their SOPs before you hire — start at the Outsource Accelerator hubs directory.
Independent
