Prime Contact Centre Location
Top quality professionals, multilingual, innovative workforce and excellent ICT infrastructure make Malta one of the most interesting international services locations on the market today. A relatively new sector of the Maltese economy, business process outsourcing (BPO) is one of the most recent success stories to emerge in Malta. Call centres offering multilingual services across a diverse range of business sectors from financial services to airline reservations have been enjoying significant success, while other areas such as shared services, data processing and management services are quickly gaining ground.
Why Malta?
With the expansion of the European Union, demand has increased for pan-European call centers that offer not just English but a multitude of other languages most notably Italian, German and French as well as Spanish. The success of Malta’s growing contact centre industry is constructed on some of Malta’s most fundamental strengths: the fact that English is an official language of the island, plus near universal fluency in Italian and widespread knowledge of at least one other European language. The island’s open business environment and flexible, can-do attitude, as well as its wide range of targeted incentives make it one of the most competitive locations for international service companies and outsourcing services.
ICT Foundation
Underpinning the success of the sector, Malta’s state-of-the-art ICT infrastructure has been key to the rapid development of international services, an area that is particularly dependent on reliable and sophisticated technology and international connectivity. With a steady stream of IT professionals graduating from the University of Malta, vocational colleges and private educational establishments every year, the industry is able to access a workforce sharply tuned to its requirements.
Industry Leaders
While Malta will not be able to compete on scale, it does have the advantage to be able to add value in terms of higher end customer care and sophisticated service, a fact that recently helped the island beat cheaper India for a 300-person call centre to handle "high-value" English-language calls for UK-based bank HSBC.
In addition to in-house deployments such as HSBC, there are a number of independent outsourcers established on the island namely Fraser Eagle, Dial-It and a host of others providing a range of services that include technical help, order taking, information lines, telesales and customer support services to a range of industries including travel and tourism, telecommunication and financial services. With an increasing number of companies now migrating back to Europe from Asia in search of higher quality levels and increased service, Malta's excellent language skills, its close cultural affinity with the UK and Europe and its strong work ethic give the island a significant advantage.
While call centres may be the most visible and successful sector of the BPO industry other areas of Malta’s service economy are equally gaining a foothold in providing high performance services. A broad range of service areas from consulting, shared services, data processing, data storage, digital media and software development projects are being delivered from Malta, offering companies significant cost reductions and improved operational effectiveness.
Malta has proved itself a dynamic, on-the-ball player in the international services market. With its highly qualified, multi-lingual workforce, advanced telecommunications structure, favourable business environment and strategic location in the centre of the Mediterranean, it has the potential to offer measurable added value to projects and operations that choose Malta as their preferred location.
Source: Country Profiler - Business & Investment Malta 2007
Updated: December 2007
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