Stressing the competitive advantage of Filipinos when it comes to information technology skills and creativity, U.S.-based financial technology company TxVia has expanded its facilities in the country in a bid to develop most of its software solutions in the Philippines.
"We're not just a call center. We can be a one-stop shop for our clients,” said TxVia managing director for the Philippines Rori Geronimo. She stressed that the company’s most valuable asset is its human resources, expressing pride in the Philippine office’s rapid growth.
The company unveiled a bigger local office in Bonifacio Global City, Taguig City last week. Just a year after TxVia invested in the Philippines, the local office has already grown into 80 employees, with further expansion seen.
“This will just be the first of multiple contact centers here,” said Ray Iglesias III, TxVia EVP of Services and Administration, who is based in the company’s New York headquarters.
According to Iglesias, the firm is looking to outsource services in the Philippines that are higher up in the business process outsourcing value chain. He said the company is bullish that the country can be its global software development center.
“We are investing here so that most of what will be built for our clients will be built in the Philippines,” Iglesias said in his speech.
At the media briefing, Geronimo explained that at present, half of the company’s headcount is accounted for by tech support. She said, however, that they expect to see more growth in the customer service sector, including training and software development.
As a financial technology company, TxVia’s goal is to provide the payment operating system for emerging payment and financial services systems, as well as helping companies migrate from legacy systems.
Unlike other solutions providers which rely on SaaS (software as a service), in which software and data are hosted centrally and delivered to clients on demand, TxVia offers the PaaS (platform as a service) model.
The idea in PaaS is not to rely on a common platform, with software that will then be customized for different clients, but rather to tailor-fit a platform to the actual needs of a client.
“Every TxVia client will have its own platform,” Iglesias said. He explained that while the platforms may have “similar aspects,” companies will get features which are unique to their own needs.
This PaaS model, according to Matthew Nyren, TxVia SVP of Services, helps accelerate speed of implementation, as clients are not “forced” to spend time customizing a common platform with features they may not need.
In response to a question from Yahoo! Southeast Asia, Nyren also said that the explosion of social media and social commerce is accelerating the growth of emerging payment facilities. This means that now, more than ever, companies need to be more flexible and react faster to the changing needs of the market.
“We are moving away from traditional institutional-led payment systems to more to peer-to-peer transactions,” Nyren said. This can be seen in the rise of different online micro-transactions over the years, from people selling and bidding online for different goods and services, to in-game purchases in different social and mobile games.
“All this is happening in the cloud. All of this is happening democratically,” Nyren pointed out, emphasizing the need for speedy implementation.
At the end of the day, TxVia expects its Philippine office to shape the solutions that it will tailor for the current and emerging needs of customers.
"Our core systems have been already built. What were looking for are business uses, and the Philippine office will address this need for model developers, quality assurance, and other customer services,” Iglesias said.
“The facilities and services here will eclipse what have in other offices,” Nyren added. “This just goes to show the rich talent and resources in this market.”
