VFS sees India as its success route
The rising number of Indians travelling overseas is making the country a sweet spot for VFS Global, the world’s biggest visaprocessing firm. The Dubai-headquartered company, which started its journey from Mumbai 17 years ago, holds a 49 per cent share in the global visa-processing industry. India, its biggest market, is clocking double-digit growth.
“India has seen exponential growth in outbound travel, not only in the tourism sector but also in migration, with people going out to work or do business. The student traffic has gone up steeply. The infrastructure that these embassies had could not have absorbed this growth. Moreover, their presence was only limited to metro cities,” Zubin Karkaria, chief executive of VFS Global, told Business Standard.
Outbound travel from India is growing at 8-10 per cent annually. Karkaria conceptualised the idea of a visa-processing firm in 2001 while working for Kuoni, a global travel firm. He recalled that on many occasions he had to postpone clients’ tours owing to visa delays. “In Mumbai, people used to queue for the US visa the night before (they were supposed to get it). It was felt that the embassy or the visa officer should focus more on decision making and not on the administrative part of checking forms and verifying documents,” said Karkaria, arguing that there was a need to bring efficiency in visa processing while ensuring convenience for applicants.
The US embassy in India happened to be the company’s first client. VFS Global works for 45 countries in India. Of the 23 million visas VFS processed in 2017, one-fifth were in India. So, the firm processes about 13,000 visas every day for Indians.
India is not just the biggest volume market for VFS, it is also a large base for its operations. Of the 9,000-plus employees it has in 137 countries, 2,500 are in India.
“India is my backbone. All the key functions that support our business are in India, including technology, information services and physical services. India is a base for research for us,” Karkaria said. VFS Global says it owns a 49 per cent share in the global visa-processing market. “We process about 23 million visas a year globally while my next competitor would be at 4 million. Globally, there are 70-odd players in the sector,” he said.
Karkaria said nobody believed in the idea in 2001. “People used to say embassies would never allow this process to be outsourced. It was good that nobody believed in the idea then and we were the only one to start investing in it for the initial seven-eight years.”
VFS is now focusing on tier-III and -IV cities, from where people have to travel to metros to get a visa. “We try to increase capacity at a rate higher than growth in travel. We have never been in a capacity crunch as we have always invested ahead of time,” said Karkaria.
He said it was not simple to deal with sensitive data of millions of applicants and the firm had to innovate to ensure protection and privacy while staying competitive. “Globally, we invest $25 million every year in technology alone. In some visa-processing tenders, you make money and in some you don’t. But at VFS Global, visa processing is our bread and butter and we continue to expand.”