NEW RESEARCH: UK BPS Market Trends & Forecasts 2014

The end of 2014 marks an inflexion point for the UK Business Process Services (BPS) market. Following several years of healthy growth in areas like public sector shared services and insurance, we now see more uncertainties and risks on the horizon.

The 2015 General Election and recent supplier scandals could impact both public and private sector. There are also deflationary implications from the move to business process automation (BPA) and other tools that shift services from traditional manual to new digital and ‘self-service’ channels.

As a result, we are now taking a slightly more cautious view on growth for the UK BPS market over the next few years, anticipating compound annual growth (CAGR) of 6.4% from 2013 to 2017, when the market will be worth £8.34bn.

Mid-single digit growth is still pretty healthy, and will ensure BPS remains the fastest growing horizontal sector across the UK SITS market (see UK SITS Market Trends and Forecasts 2014). The fundamentals remain sound across public and private sectors seeking help standardising and transforming business processes, re-platforming, and removing cost from operations.

What has changed in 2014 is organisations looking at ways to free up spend to invest in digital technologies and services (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) in what we call the ‘Race for Change’. The needle will move further on this path in 2015 as organisations attempt to ‘Join the Dots’, seeking ways to connect and extract real business value from these new technologies, gadgets and devices.

Within the BPS market ‘Joining the Dots’ is about how you join up these myriad systems and processes; automate low value administrative activities; drive actionable insights out of all the ‘big data’ and support your customers through the journey to digital. There are many outcomes on this journey, but the single biggest one is enabling a step change in the customer experience.

These are big market shaping trends that will create both challenges to suppliers as well as many new opportunities over the coming years. There will be pockets of much stronger growth too in areas like Platform BPO, Business Process Automation, and Business Process as-a-Service (BPaaS) that offer more flexible and cost effective ways of consuming BPS.

Subscribers to TechMarketView’s BusinessProcessViews research stream can read where to place your bets on UK BPS growth in our new report UK Business Process Services Market Trends & Forecasts 2014. The accompanying forecasts data and charts can be found here.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, please contact Deb Seth (deseth@techmarketview.com) who will be happy to help.

Posted by John O'Brien at '11:13' - Tagged: bpo   bps