Exclusive Interview with Shikhar Aggarwal, Joint Managing Director, BLS International

BLS has scaled up its operations by providing services to 46 governments spread across 66 countries with a network of over 15,500 offices. The company has been serving multiple Governments/ Embassies including India, Brazil, Spain, Germany, Italy, Hungary, the Philippines, the USA, Canada, Estonia, Lebanon, Portugal, Vietnam, Morocco, Belarus, France, UAE, Thailand, etc. for visa outsourcing and consular services. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Shikhar Aggarwal, Joint Managing Director, BLS International.

1) Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers

BLS International is a trusted global tech-enabled services partner for governments and citizens. It has a diversified business related to visas, passports, e-visa, identity management, and consular services, and also delivers front-end services to governments in India and globally.

BLS has scaled up its operations by providing services to 46 governments spread across 66 countries with a network of over 15,500 offices. The company has been serving multiple Governments/ Embassies including India, Brazil, Spain, Germany, Italy, Hungary, the Philippines, the USA, Canada, Estonia, Lebanon, Portugal, Vietnam, Morocco, Belarus, France, UAE, Thailand, etc. for visa outsourcing and consular services.

The company also assists state and provincial governments to empower their citizens by providing citizen services through a single window. BLS has partnered with governments to provide proven solutions for transparent and accountable governance that reduces processing timelines and ensures efficient delivery. BLS has a robust network of ~12,000 Customer Service Centres (CSCs) across Punjab, UP & Rajasthan in India. This CSCs are the single point of contact for most of the citizen services like birth certificates, marriage registration, utility bill payment, arms license, and many more across these respective states.

Through Starfin, it provides banking and financial services with a network of over 3,000 centres delivering last-mile banking services to the underserved remote and rural population of India.     

2) With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

Our mission is to provide easy, innovative, and agile solutions to governments for their citizens across the world. BLS International aims at touching the lives of a billion people globally by creating a differentiated service experience using innovation and technology.

We at BLS International are always focused to build robust tech-enabled processes with efficient execution and investments in technologies for enhancing the customer experience. We are working keeping in mind these top key objectives:

• Strengthening relations with the existing customer base will eventually help us to get more contracts in the vicinity of e-governance, visas, consular, e-visas, retail, etc
• Establishing a dominant global presence at the back of our core tech strengths, to access international markets and target missions that are already outsourcing the services

Our seamless developments including application submission, automation of processes, helplines, biometric enrolment, appointments, collection and remittance of fees on the applicant's behalf, and a host of value-added services for the applicant's convenience have helped us to move ahead in our domain.

3) Tell us how your company is contributing in the IoT/AI/Big Data Analytics/Robotics/Self-Driving Vehicles/Cloud Computing industry of the nation and how it is benefiting the clients.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning in travel and tourism are being used to predict travel choices, complete booking, personalized services, and manage in-trip and post-trip needs.

BLS International has adopted AI-backed application processing which makes the process faster, easier and more effective. We have AI and analytics built into the system and we use the feedback mechanism to capture and analyse the customer experience and try to improve basis that.

Our e-visa eliminates the strenuous process of coming to the visa application centre harnessing the OCR technology by processing the visa from the comfort of the applicant's home. We use Chatbots to assist our applicants with the current status of the travel document that is being processed. It provides relevant information to the applicant with reduced interactions/ conversations.

4) What's your growth plans for the next 12 months?

We have delivered an outstanding performance for the year, surpassing the pre-Covid levels in terms of revenue. With the reopening of borders across geographies and an increase in business and leisure travel, we are seeing sustained growth month-on-month, which has resulted in revenues of 850 Crores for FY22. During the quarter, we reported a revenue of Rs.254 Crores, which is up 75% year-on-year largely driven by organic growth and a strong rebound in our core business of visa, passport, and consular services.

In visa and consular business, our growth would come from multiple fronts including new clients, new geographies, and enhanced services to the existing clients. With respect to the National Business Correspondent – Starfin Business, we have currently impanelled with five banks (State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, Punjab National Bank, Central Bank of India, and Uttarakhand Gramin Bank) and our short to medium-term goal is to tie-up with more banks and become one of the largest players in the field. In our citizen services business, we have successfully built the execution capabilities through our projects in Punjab, UP, and Rajasthan. Here our growth would come from more such contracts in other states of India as well as international markets. We have already established international experience through our contracts in UAE, Estonia, and Afghanistan.

According to a recent report¹ by World Travel & Tourism Council, a massive increase in global international inbound travel is expected with a busy summer ahead for key destinations across the Asia Pacific, Europe, and America. We believe as the countries across the globe are opening up for tourists, we will experience a potential demand, and the incremental revenue from the visa business will drive the financial performance of our company.  

In the next two years, there are close to USD 1.5 billion worth of visa & consular contracts coming up for retendering and we are geared up to grab a good share of it.

5) What does your technology and business roadmap look like for the rest of the year?

BLS International has a unique asset-light business model and the performance in Q2 FY22 is a clear indication of the fact that not only is the visa and consular business improving but we are also expecting a higher contribution in revenue from other businesses. We believe once the travel around the world starts completely, the incremental revenue from the visa business will propel the top line and bottom line of the company. We are hopeful that in the coming quarters the company should achieve an all-time high profit and the margins will rebound sharply in the coming quarters on account of better performance from visa and consular service businesses.

Our focus is to build robust tech-enabled processes with efficient execution and investments in technologies to utilize exciting possibilities related to digitization, last-mile penetration and enhanced service experience. We continue to leverage competence and deepening presence with our existing client base by offering greater services thereby increasing wallet share in the front-end & citizen, visa, consular, e-governance, attestation, biometric, and e-visa vicinity.