Item 1. Business
ITEM 1. BUSINESS
Company Overview
Ibex is a leading provider in global business process outsourcing and end-to-end customer engagement technology solutions that helps drive extraordinary customer experiences (“CX”) for the world’s most recognized brands. We combine our strong heritage of delivering world-class CX operations delivery with best-in-class services and solutions that span omnichannel customer engagement and support, digital marketing and customer experience management to help our clients measure customer sentiment and deliver a superior CX to their end-customers.
Leveraging our proprietary technology platform, company culture and operational excellence, ibex helps more than 130 clients create innovative and differentiated customer experiences to help increase loyalty, enhance brand awareness and drive revenue in an era of rapid change and digital transformation.
Our Service Offerings
The services we provide for clients are digital and traditional omni-channel capabilities. We have designed a differentiated suite of digital and operational solutions meant to seamlessly manage interactions throughout the phases of the customer lifecycle, across multiple channels, customized to a client’s specific needs.
Our services cover three areas: Digital & Omni-Channel Customer Experience (ibex Connect), Digital Marketing and E-Commerce (ibex Digital) and Digital CX surveys and analytics (ibex CX).
• ibex Connect
Our Connect business lies at the core of our offerings and generates the majority of the Company’s revenue. This business unit delivers differentiated customer service (assisting our clients’ customers with information about our clients’ and their products or services), technical support (providing specialized teams to provide information, assistance and technical guidance to our clients’ customers on a specific product or service), revenue generation (upselling and cross selling) and other value-added outsourced back office services (finance and accounting, marketing support, sales operations, and human resources administration) to our clients. We deploy these capabilities through a true omni-channel CX model, which integrates voice, email, chat, SMS, social media and other communication applications.
• ibex Digital
Our ibex Digital suite of solutions works with consumer-facing businesses to help them build, grow and scale technology-driven customer acquisition solutions, while helping drive digital transformation. We offer digital marketing, e-commerce technology, and platform solutions for some of the largest and fastest growing brands, helping them build new customer acquisition channels, increase acquired customers, and often do both at a reduced cost.
• ibex CX
Our CX business measures, monitors and manages our clients’ holistic customer experiences. By offering a 360-degree CX approach, our clients can harness the power of the data and customer feedback to differentiate themselves within today’s “customer expectation economy.” We enable our clients to improve retention of their customers, identify and manage service issues in real time, predict future behavior and outcomes, derive impact analysis scenarios and assign “action plans” throughout the enterprise.
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Our Culture
Ibex is built around an agent-first culture, developed and delivered through a combination of branded sites, technology-enabled recruiting and hiring, geographically and culturally specific benefits, and world-class employee engagement. Ibex offers a unique employee experience that includes a full range of activities and events for employees year-round, including annual employee VIP events, ibex Idol global talent competition, ibex Sirens beauty pageant celebrating LGBTQIA+ employees, Customer Service Week and ongoing employee wellness programs. This culture resonates with our employees across the globe, where we score an Employee Net Promoter Score (“eNPS”) of 68, and externally, where we have been recognized as:
• 2023 Philippines Best Employer Brand Award – Philippines Leadership Congress and Awards
• 2023 America's Greatest Workplaces for Diversity – Newsweek
• 2023 Philippines’ Best Employers – Philippine Daily Inquirer/Statista
• Best BPO and Gender Diversity and Inclusivity in Pakistan – Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA) ICT Awards 2022
• Best Place to Work in Nicaragua 2020, 2021, 2022 – Great Place to Work
• Best Place to Work for Women in Central America and Caribbean 2021 & 2022 – Great Place to Work
Our Technology
The foundation for ibex service offerings is our WaveX technology platform. WaveX is a differentiated suite of digital and technology solutions designed to power enhanced agent interactions, exceptional client CX, and overall better performance. Our technology helps clients drive insights and manage interactions across their entire customer journey. We believe this capability allows us to provide innovative, automated and customizable solutions to our clients more efficiently versus a pure labor arbitrage-based delivery model.
Our Business Insights
Ibex’s WaveX technology and analytics insight platform suite improves customer interactions, customer insights, contact center performance and client outcomes. These solutions are deployed across more than 90 client engagements, where we deliver enhanced analytics and insights and process improvements across recruiting, hiring, training, management, and customer experience.
Our Flexible Operating Delivery Model
Our global delivery model is built on onshore (continental United States), nearshore (Nicaragua, Honduras and Jamaica) and offshore (Philippines and Pakistan) customer experience delivery centers, and includes a unique ability to support work-at-home capabilities in any region. We operate in the following geographies for our service offerings:
Customer Engagement
We operate 31 delivery centers located in the United States, Philippines, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Pakistan, and Honduras. As of June 30, 2023, we have approximately 24,000 agents across these centers.
Customer Acquisition
We operate four acquisition-focused Centers of Excellence, one in Jamaica, one in the Philippines, and two in Pakistan, which are focused on customer acquisition on behalf of our clients. As of June 30, 2023, the number of agents dedicated to customer acquisition was more than 200.
Customer Experience Technology Solutions
We deliver our CX technology solutions to our clients primarily through a cloud-based delivery model. Our Analytics solution is an add-on solution, which includes technology such as omni-channel speech analytics utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) along with business analysts who provide various insights.
Driven by our position in the digital-first market, in the last three fiscal years, we have experienced over 55% growth in our on-site nearshore and offshore capacity while shrinking our domestic on-site capacity by almost half. As of June 30, 2023, 94% of our total on-site capacity resides in our high-growth high margin nearshore
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and offshore markets, which are ideally placed for clients who are either digital-first or those who are digitally transforming their business.
Our Strategic Approach
Our strategy is to place a high priority on delivering great customer experiences across the customer lifecycle and to focus on clients who view CX as a competitive differentiator. We have transformed our business from a traditional business process outsourcer (BPO) of commoditized call center support to a technology-led provider and partner of choice.
Companies are looking for enhanced solutions beyond pure labor arbitrage. They require partners that can enhance their brand and customer loyalty. Key attributes include tech-led solutions, a highly connected culture and superior level of employee engagement, elevated branding, and a fast and effective path to operational proficiency. Our approach focuses on high growth clients that are experiencing increased demand for their products and services. In addition, we serve companies that are transforming their CX to a digital-first model. These target clients are looking for partners that can deliver a digital-first experience to their customers, while enhancing their brand and customer loyalty, at scale. We call this BPO 2.0, and believe ibex is at the forefront of delivering these differentiated solutions at scale across our geographies.
Our growth strategy is predicated on four growth pillars.
1. the ability to harness innovative technology that creates increased efficiencies for our business and our clients’ business
2. our strong track record of delivering best-in-class operations
3. a high-performing company culture that breeds expertise and real-world knowledge amongst a very talented employee base and
4. a customer-devoted mentality that breeds loyalty and long-term relationships. This loyalty is evidenced by the extended relationships we have with our customers.
Together, they serve as the catalyst for delivering business solutions that help our clients as they tackle their toughest business challenges, while providing differentiated and real-time experiences for their end-customers.
Our growth model is designed to deploy a “land and expand” approach where we win a client, outperform and subsequently enhance the partnership scope with these clients. Typically, we will launch in one center with one service, such as customer engagement. Our goal is then to “expand” with additional services or new geographies where we operate for our clients. We also maintain an acquisition strategy that targets situations in which it is optimal to acquire versus build. We expect to primarily focus on adding additional omni-channel capabilities, providing access to new geographies and acquiring technologies that further differentiate our solutions.
The breadth of our capabilities, our ability to deliver a superior experience to our clients and our global delivery capabilities have allowed us to successfully land new clients and then expand our wallet share with them over time.
Our Clients
We seek to partner with growing companies with emerging brands to help drive their customer engagement in ways that can revolutionize the way consumers connect and invest in their brands of choice harnessing the power of technology. These brands span across e-commerce, retail, FinTech, HealthTech, streaming content, ride sharing and hospitality. We also serve large Fortune 500 companies with very established brands. Our clients fit primarily within two categories:
New Economy Companies. The first category of clients is digitally driven “disruptors.” We refer to these clients as the “New Economy” companies. They tend to be faster-growing brands in high-growth industry verticals, such as (but not limited to) technology, e-commerce and consumer services. Our service offering to our New Economy clients is designed to meet the needs for new economy verticals and high-growth requirements, with a focus on launch, speed-to-performance, and scale. While many of these New Economy clients are smaller, fast-growing companies, there are several Fortune 500 companies within this group, such as Amazon and one of the
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leading ride-sharing companies in the United States. The success of our New Economy initiative with high-growth technology, e-commerce and consumer services clients is a key driver in the increase of our revenue from non-voice channels, and, as a result, has a positive effect on our profitability with their growth trajectory and greater propensity for these clients to leverage digital forms of service delivery.
Blue Chip Companies. The second category is made up of mostly Fortune 500 brands, across a broad range of industries, such as telecommunications, cable, financial services, and healthcare, which have large customer bases and rely on outsourced providers to maximize customer retention and improve customer expansion. We refer to these clients as “blue chip” companies. Increasingly, clients in this category look to us as a nimble provider offering differentiated services as they face challenges in the wake of digital disruption. We apply our execution expertise and end-to-end CX technology suite to help enable these clients adapt in a changing environment that requires a different type of customer experience for digital-native consumers.
Within these two categories of companies, our core focus is on winning and growing partnerships with those clients we refer to as BPO 2.0 clients – those companies focused on providing amazing experiences to their customers, while enhancing their brand and customer loyalty, at scale, focusing on digital-first and integrated omni-channel delivery. Our BPO 2.0 clients won since 2016 have grown at a 68% compounded annual growth rate (“CAGR”) and comprised 77% of our consolidated revenue in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2023.
Our success leveraging and embedding our WaveX technology and analytics insight platform suite across client engagements enhances and strengthens the nature of our client relationships. This is evidenced both by our high client retention rates, as well as our client Net Promoter Score (“NPS”) of 68.
Our contracts with clients generally take the form of a master services agreement, which is a framework agreement that is then supplemented by one or more statements of work. Our master services agreements specify the general terms applicable to the services we provide. Our statements of work specify the specific services to be provided and associated performance metrics and pricing.
Industry Overview and Trends
Historically, the industry was premised on labor arbitrage and cost. Offshoring of work to markets like India and the Philippines was driven primarily by the cost advantages those markets provided. Today, our business is experiencing significant growth with clients that require best-in-class performance and differentiated value propositions. Several trends are driving growth and transformation in the outsourced customer interactions market.
The BPO industry is undergoing a paradigm shift with Blue Chip clients pivoting toward technology-enabled marketplaces supporting an increasingly digitally native consumer base. This represents a key area for ibex to continue to capture market share.
These Blue Chip companies are reacting to this shifting landscape with a relentless focus on CX. They view their customer contact center providers as essential partners and an extension of their brand rather than a cost center to manage customer interaction. As a result, they are often moving away from their incumbent legacy providers to find service providers that can deliver better and differentiated customer support. They are not just looking for labor to manage contacts, but rather they are looking for great customer experiences.
In addition to clients in mature industries, emerging industries in the technology and consumer services sectors are changing the mix of solutions, channels and delivery locations. We believe that participants that offer a flexible, technology-oriented, and integrated solution will be best positioned to address the following key industry trends:
1. A Dramatic Prioritization of CX – As brands recognize that digital feedback mechanisms, such as social media, can rapidly impact brand perception in a positive or negative manner, the importance of delivering an exceptional customer experience has become a top priority for companies.
2. Consumer Centricity & Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) – Customer expectations and behaviors are changing dramatically. Enabled by immediate feedback channels, consumers expect that enterprises will meet their needs and preferences instantaneously in return for brand loyalty and greater share of
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customer spend. Accordingly, enterprises and brands are more focused on understanding their consumers’ needs and developing business models that hinge on maximizing customer lifetime value. In turn, they are demanding outsourced customer engagement partners that can deliver customer-centric solutions in an omni-channel manner that maximizes customer retention.
3. Outsourcing Across the Operational Value Chain – Enterprises are more frequently relying on outsourced providers to address their needs across the entire customer lifecycle. Many companies, especially in the HealthTech, FinTech and utilities space, are increasingly relying on the expertise of external providers to deliver cost savings, ensure compliance, drive performance enhancements, and offer technology suites that serve to improve overall CX while allowing the brand to focus on their core products and competencies. Mature companies seek to digitally transform their current operations to meet the demands of the digital economy and diversify their capabilities. Companies in emerging sectors outsource due to their limited experience and/or resources to manage increasing volumes of customer interactions, and in order to drive new customer demand, scale operations, optimize costs, protect their brand investment, and accelerate profitability.
4. Rise of Omni-Channel to Drive Consumer Centricity − Customer expectations and behaviors are changing dramatically with the evolution of technology such as smart phones, tablets and social media. This has accelerated the speed of consumer interaction with brands. Consumers expect the brands to meet their needs and preferences instantaneously in return for brand loyalty and a greater share of customer spend. To address this trend, brands are focused on providing a seamless experience via integration of all contact channels (chat, email, SMS, voice, etc.) to deliver customer-centric solutions in an omni-channel manner that maximize customer lifetime value.
5. Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) to Enhance Service Delivery − With the increasing applicability of AI in enhancing business processes, the customer care industry is starting to integrate AI into its range of solutions to improve the customer experience and improve efficiencies. The proliferation and evolution of generative AI may have impacts on the CX sector. Potential automation in back-end and middle-office business processes, as well as potential increased use of bots to respond to pre-defined queries, could impact assisted customer interactions. Additionally, productivity and data availability and quality due to generative AI could result in an increased volume of work, as agents may be up-skilled to deploy improved analytical capabilities. The adoption of Generative AI also presents key challenges in the forms of data security, governance, implementation and coordination of an overall customer service solution. These challenges create opportunities for trusted CX partners.
6. Seeking Integrated End-to-End Partners – We believe clients are increasingly looking to utilize outsourcing partners who can provide unified solutions for a variety of touchpoints along the customer interaction value chain, from digital marketing to customer sales and support to CX and surveys. We believe providers with integrated offerings will command a larger share of wallet from their clients, drive a great degree of insight and performance; this ultimately drives a longer term, mutually beneficial partnership.
7. Bestshore Flexible Delivery Model – Clients are increasingly choosing providers based on their ability to provide a flexible, turnkey delivery model that can offer a mix of onshore, nearshore, offshore, and remote working capabilities. However, in today’s industry, we believe clients are looking for the best provider in the specific market that they are considering, as opposed to finding one provider across all geographies. With recent global events, clients have indicated a growing emphasis on the ability of service providers to shift their delivery rapidly between various location models.
8. Data Protection & Security − With the rise of the digital economy has come a rise in both the concern toward, and vulnerability of, consumer data. Both mature and new economy brands are placing a higher degree of focus on the technology that underpins the data security and fraud systems deployed by their partners; having an advanced and secure system architecture along with data center redundancy and advanced security technologies are becoming increasingly important, understanding that any security breach can result in a devastating impact to a client’s brand and a consumer’s loyalty.
9. Data and Analytics − Companies are increasingly demanding that their providers of customer interaction solutions integrate data analysis and insight into their core service offerings, to drive
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continuous performance and superior outcomes. These business intelligence tools can yield actionable insights across every customer touchpoint, which in turn enable clients to address customer issues in real time. We expect that investments in automation, digitization and machine learning will become key drivers in the industry as clients seek to adopt more technology-rich ways of servicing their customers.
10. Integrated Technology Solutions for Mature Sectors – Fortune 500 companies that historically utilized traditional live-agent, voice-based services are now integrating new technology-enabled solutions that include multi-channel delivery, self-serve options and automation. Such solutions allow them to achieve greater operational flexibility and innovate their service offerings.
11. Solutions Catered to High-Growth Sectors – The challenges that new economy “disruptors” consist of managing high growth within their customer base, while simultaneously maintaining a high-quality customer experience. In contrast to mature business models, new economy companies have generally not focused on developing large-scale insourced customer operations; therefore, they rely on external partners that can deliver customer service, engagement and support while maintaining the quality of their brands. Most of these companies source their customer interaction needs from lower-cost locations outside their home markets.
Sales and Marketing
Our sales and marketing teams work closely together to drive awareness and adoption of our technology-enabled customer lifecycle experience (“CLX”) platform, accelerate customer acquisition and expand the relationship with our existing customers. We focus on developing long-term relationships with large strategic clients that have needs across the entire CLX lifecycle and employ a “land and expand” strategy to grow these relationships. Under this strategy, we seek to build the client’s trust through flawless execution on the initial assignment (which is typically for a single solution or geography) and then expand the scope of our engagement with the client into multiple geographies and business lines, which allows us to offer additional CLX solutions. In this manner, the “land and expand” strategy provides opportunities for us to substantially increase our revenues within our existing client base over time.
Our sales and marketing activities are focused on our key market verticals: telecommunications and cable, technology, retail, emerging and high-growth technology, healthcare, financial services and utilities. We believe our vertical market focus allows us to provide deep domain expertise and positions us as the best partner to help solve our clients’ unique needs. An essential part of our sales strategy is to focus on ways we can innovate on behalf of our clients, which includes digitization strategies and usage of data, technology, analytics and insights. We are well positioned with the top brands in each of the industry verticals in which we operate and can leverage domain knowledge and strong client references to generate business with other companies in the same industry vertical. Our sales and marketing teams are leading the charge at the following initiatives.
New Logos. Our new logo organization is made up of teams focused on our key market verticals. Each team is focused solely on penetrating and closing business with the top 40 clients in each vertical. In addition, they will often partner with our client services executives who have an intimate understanding of the client’s business and needs, to actively identify and target additional cross-sell opportunities across the entire CLX lifecycle.
New Economy. The New Economy team is focused on penetrating a broader reach of unicorn and potential unicorn clients in the emerging technology and consumer services sector. Through our New Economy offering, we combine Customer Engagement, Customer Acquisition and Customer Experience into an integrated solution set that is focused on the high-growth technology, e-commerce and consumer services markets for new economy clients.
The sales process for a new client can be short or lengthy depending on the client. Generally, the sales process for our New Economy target clients is 30-60 days, while selling to larger blue-chip clients can range as long as 18 months.
Client Services. Our client services team is dedicated to maintaining and expanding our relationships with our existing clients and is made up of teams that are organized either around a single large client or around companies of clients that collectively provide scale to warrant the investment of client services overhead. A majority of the senior leadership of the client services team is located in the United States and is supported by
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local team members located closer to the actual service delivery, sometimes in other countries / regions. The members of our client services team typically have deep operational experience as well as strong relationship-building and selling skills. Often our client services team for an account has a team member located close to the client’s premises in the United States as well as a member that is located close to where the delivery takes place, which is now increasingly in offshore and nearshore locations. Most of the new opportunities created within the embedded base of existing clients are led by the senior leadership of the client services team and follow the same general sales process as the new logo team.
As part of our highly engaged, or “leaned in” corporate culture, our client relationships are set up at multiple levels and layers, all the way from our Chief Executive Officer through the business heads of our organization. The multi-layered nature of these relationships allows us to develop even stronger client engagements.
Marketing Efforts . Our marketing efforts are focused on generating awareness of our offerings, establishing and promoting our brand, reaching and serving the CLX needs of key decision makers in our target verticals, and cultivating a community of successful and vocal customers. We focus our marketing effort on demonstrating to our prospective clients our thought leadership in the CLX market, addressing the challenges facing companies across the full CLX lifecycle, and engaging business leaders who are seeking to leverage data, technology, analytics, and insights to drive competitive differentiation. We take a targeted approach and work with enterprises across our target verticals: retail, e-commerce, telecommunications, technology, cable / broadband, HealthTech, FinTech and utilities. We engage with key decision makers outside of request for proposal (or “RFP”) cycles in the following key offices: Chief Digital Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Experience Officer, Chief Customer Officer and the Chief Marketing Officer.
We also use various social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook to promote our brand externally to target clients and internally to our employees and prospective employees, with the latter being a key component of our success in achieving award winning agent engagement.
Competition
The business process outsourcing (“BPO”) industry has a long track record of major consolidation. Currently four major BPO companies are completing mergers, consolidating into two companies. We believe this creates opportunities for ibex, as these consolidations may lead buyers of BPO services to look for new providers for two key reasons. One, the consolidation may lead buyers to be over-concentrated in spend with a single vendor, pushing them to look for new providers. Two, the homogenization of vendors creates greater opportunity for offering differentiated services.
The BPO markets in which we compete are highly fragmented. We believe this creates significant opportunity for a broad and differentiated provider like us as clients are increasingly looking to utilize outsourcing partners who can provide unified solutions for a variety of touchpoints along the customer interaction value chain, from customer sales and support to digital marketing, CX, and surveys. We expect providers with integrated offerings will command a larger share of wallet from their clients, drive a greater degree of insight and performance, and ultimately drive a longer term and mutually beneficial partnership.
Although we do not believe any single competitor currently offers a directly comparable end-to-end CLX solution, we believe our integrated platform faces competition from a variety of companies which operate in distinct segments of the customer lifecycle journey. The client selection process typically considers scale, quality of the facilities, and strength of leadership and brand of the provider in the selected market. Clients will usually reward higher-performing vendors with a greater share of their spend on customer interaction solutions. Based on our industry knowledge, traditional BPO companies are seeking to respond to these dynamics by taking steps to evolve into fully-fledged end-to-end customer lifecycle experience platforms, including through acquisitions. However, such initiatives have been limited due to the scarcity of actionable at-scale assets.
We also face competition from in-house customer service departments, which seek to develop, deploy and service applications that offer functionality similar to our solutions. These in-house customer service departments continue to constitute the largest segment of customer lifecycle management expenditures.
We believe that the most significant competitive factor in the sale of outsourced customer engagement services is the ability of providers to act as partners to and extensions of clients’ brands, in an effort to deliver improved
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customers experience and increased overall customer lifetime value (“LTV”). Other important factors include maintaining high and consistent levels of service quality, tailored value-added service offerings, supported by advanced technological capabilities, industry and domain expertise, an understanding of the digital marketplace and modern consumer, sufficient diversified global delivery coverage, reliability, scalability, security and competitive pricing.
Changes in geographic strategy, where a client is looking to move business from onshore to offshore or nearshore, or balance their workload between nearshore and offshore, often create opportunities for outsourced customer interaction providers. Our geographic growth with clients is a key part of our overall growth strategy.
Our Competitive Strengths and Differentiators
We utilize a differentiated value proposition to support our clients and drive value. We place the customer at the core of our business strategy and deliver world-class CX capabilities, operational delivery excellence, efficiency, and reliability to enhance our clients’ success. We are focused on building deep relationships at multiple levels within our clients’ businesses. Coupled with our ability to consistently perform at or above expectations, this has enabled us to expand the number of high value CLX solutions we provide for our clients. This approach, over time, has led to higher client retention rates. Additionally, we closely monitor customer satisfaction via NPS, which is tracked through our annual Client Satisfaction Survey. Our most recent survey scored a client NPS of 68 which indicates strong, mutually-beneficial relationships with clients built on the value they place in ibex services and solutions along with the level of service consistently being delivered.
As evidenced by the quality and quantity of our new customer wins, growth and market share with these clients and our track record of amazing customer retention, we believe we have clearly established ourselves as a CX leader in today’s digital economy. Our vertical industry expertise high-growth areas, including Retail and E-Commerce, Travel, Transportation & Logistics, HealthTech, and FinTech, allows us to adapt our services and solutions for clients, further embedding us into their customer engagement lifecycle while delivering impactful business results. We do this through leveraging our key competitive strengths:
1. Differentiated as a nimble, disruptive provider – Companies continue to seek disruptive partners that are fast and flexible. We believe that we have a distinct organizational culture that embraces technological disruption and is characterized by innovation, speed and structural nimbleness. Our innovative and entrepreneurial culture is a key differentiator and gives us a competitive advantage in delivering high-quality solutions to clients around the globe.
2. WaveX technology solutions to drive performance and innovation – ibex WaveX is the hub of our technology development and innovation effort to drive value-added solutions for improved agent interactions, client CX, and overall performance. WaveX is a platform that spans both the customer and agent lifecycle from customer acquisition, to engagement, to surveys and analytics. Our proprietary technology, combined with our Wave Zero launch process enables us to accelerate “Speed to Green” for our clients and outperform our competition. We have enhanced WaveX to leverage the power of generative artificial intelligence to assist our agents in delivering great customer experiences, to provide deeper and more meaningful insights in our analytics offering and provide machine-assisted interactions for the customers of our clients.
3. Best brand and employer in the markets we operate – Our goal is to be the best employer which helps create a virtuous cycle of the ability to attract and retain the best leadership and front-line agents. This in turn creates great performance that drives growth and expansion and expanded career opportunities for our personnel. The result is not only being recognized by the Great Places to Work and Great Places to Work for Women awards, but also by scoring at industry leading scores for eNPS in markets like Jamaica, Nicaragua, and Bohol, Philippines.
4. Broad set of full lifecycle digital services –The services we provide for our clients include three key services – Digital & Omni-Channel Customer Experience (ibex Connect), Digital Marketing and E-Commerce (ibex Digital) and Digital CX surveys and analytics (ibex CX). This contrasts to many of our traditional competitors that are focused solely on contact center services. Our digital services also have significantly less agent attrition than traditional BPO programs. Agent attrition is a key cost and performance component where low attrition drives higher margins and better performance for ibex and
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our clients. Often these digital services are provided in our high-margin nearshore and offshore regions, contributing to their growth.
5. World-class global delivery with significant growth in nearshore and offshore regions – Our global delivery model is built on onshore, nearshore and offshore delivery centers, and includes our ability to also support work-at-home capabilities. We seek to operate state-of-the-art “highly-branded” sites in labor markets that are under-penetrated in order to maintain our competitive advantage, retain our position in those labor markets as an employer of choice and deliver a highly scalable and cost-effective solution to our clients. Our delivery centers enable us to create a differentiated connection to our clients’ brands and their customers. In addition, with a broad growing network of 31 delivery centers spread across multiple geographies, we provide much needed geographic diversity for our clients. In particular, significant investments made in Jamaica, Honduras, and Nicaragua, enable us to offer untapped talent pools for high-quality service, proximity to home operations, competitive price points, and an existing brand affinity. We have become the largest BPO employer in Jamaica and Nicaragua with over 5,700 and 2,900 employees, respectively. In addition, we’ve become the largest provider and first mover in Bohol, Philippines, where we have over 2,300 employees. We are also the largest BPO employer in Pakistan, which we believe is a truly disruptive market for the industry. Of our largest 25 clients, we service 17 of them across multiple regions creating great market diversification and business continuity. We also believe that providing services for our clients across multiple regions promotes a trusted relationship with our clients and is consistent with our “land and expand” client strategy.
Our broad portfolio of CX services and technology solutions give our clients a competitive advantage, while also providing them with the ability to deliver a relevant and differentiating experience for their customers. We believe these technologies will enable us to outperform our competition.
Seasonality
Our business performance is subject to seasonal fluctuations. Within our customer engagement solutions, some of our retail-facing clients undergo an increase in activity during the calendar year-end holiday period. These seasonal effects cause differences in revenues and expenses among the various quarters of any financial year, which means that the individual quarters should not be directly compared with each other or be used to predict annual financial results. This intra-year seasonal fluctuation is common in the BPO industry, with increased volumes during the fourth calendar quarter of the year.
Within our customer acquisition solution, our revenues may increase during the summer period when households tend to move and activate telecommunications services in their new homes, as well as during the final quarter of the calendar year when the year-end holiday season begins.
Intellectual Property
The success of our business depends, in part, on our proprietary technology and intellectual property. We rely on a combination of intellectual property laws and contractual arrangements to protect our intellectual property. We have invested significant resources into building and deploying proprietary technology, focusing on next-generation software deployed across the full customer lifecycle journey, driving revenue growth, productivity improvements, experience enhancement and competitive differentiation.
We have registered or are registering various trademarks and service marks in the U.S. and/or other countries for our brand and our technology. The duration of trademark and service mark registrations varies from country to country but may generally be renewed indefinitely as long as the marks are in use and their registrations are properly maintained. We also have common law rights to certain trademarks and service marks.
We also have and maintain certain trade secrets arising out of the authorship or creation of proprietary computer programs, systems and business practices. Confidentiality is maintained primarily through contractual clauses, and in the case of computer programs, system access controls, tracking and authorization processes.
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Regulation
We are subject to a number of U.S. federal and state and foreign laws and regulations that involve matters central to our business. These laws and regulations may involve privacy, data protection, intellectual property, competition, consumer protection, export taxation and other subjects. In addition, the terms of our service contracts typically require that we comply with applicable laws and regulations. In some of our service contracts, we are contractually required to comply even if such laws and regulations apply to our clients, but not to us, and sometimes our clients require us to take specific steps intended to make it easier for our clients to comply with requirements that are applicable to them. If we fail to comply with any applicable laws and regulations, we may be restricted in our ability to provide services and may also be the subject of civil or criminal actions involving penalties, any of which could have a material adverse effect on our operations. Our clients generally have the right to terminate our contracts for cause in the event of regulatory failures, subject to notice periods. See “Item 1A. Risk Factors” for more information.
As of December 31, 2022, the last business day of our second fiscal quarter, the Company determined that we will no longer qualify as a foreign private issuer. Effective July 1, 2023, we are required to file periodic reports on U.S. domestic filer forms with the SEC and to comply with other rules as required, including but not limited to presenting this Form 10-K in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States (“U.S. GAAP”), with such change being applied retrospectively. See “ Risk Factors – The transition from foreign private issuer to U.S. domestic issuer status effective from July 1, 2023, will require us to comply with the U.S. domestic reporting requirements under the Exchange Act and will result in significant additional compliance activity and likely increased costs and expenses.”
Bermuda Laws
As a Bermuda company, we are also subject to regulation in Bermuda. Among other things, we must comply with the provisions of the Companies Act regulating the declaration and payment of dividends and the making of distributions from contributed surplus, which generally prohibit dividends or distributions unless certain capital and liquidity standards are met.
We are classified as a non-resident of Bermuda for exchange control purposes by the Bermuda Monetary Authority (“BMA”). Pursuant to our non-resident status, we may engage in transactions in currencies other than Bermuda dollars. There are no restrictions on our ability to transfer funds in and out of Bermuda or to pay dividends to United States residents that are holders of our common shares.
Under Bermuda law, “exempted” companies are companies formed for the purpose of conducting business outside Bermuda. As an exempted company, we may not, without a license granted by the Minister of Economic Development, participate in certain business transactions, including transactions involving Bermuda landholding rights and the carrying on of business of any kind, for which we are not licensed in Bermuda.
On December 31, 2018, the Bermuda government enacted the Substance Act, with effect from July 1, 2019 for existing Bermuda entities, requiring certain entities in Bermuda engaged in “relevant activities” to maintain a substantial economic presence in Bermuda and to satisfy economic substance requirements. The list of “relevant activities” includes holding entities, and the legislation requires Bermuda companies engaging in a “relevant activity” to be locally managed and directed, to carry on core income generating activities in Bermuda, to maintain adequate physical presence in Bermuda, and to have an adequate level of local full time qualified employees and incur adequate operating expenditure in Bermuda. Under the Substance Act, any entity that must satisfy economic substance requirements but fails to do so could face automatic disclosure to competent authorities in the European Union of the information filed by the entity with the Bermuda Registrar of Companies in connection with the economic substance requirements and may also face financial penalties, restriction or regulation of its business activities or may be struck as a registered entity in Bermuda. We continue to evaluate the Substance Act and its requirements, as well as its application to our business.
See “ Risk Factors - Risks Related to Being Incorporated in Bermuda” for more information .
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Privacy, Data Protection, and Cybersecurity
We use, collect, store, transmit, transfer, and process customer data in the ordinary course of business. As our products are designed to assist business customers with customer support services, in the ordinary course of business, when providing its services, only a portion of the customer data that we use, collect, store, transmit, transfer and process constitutes personal data, personally identifiable information, personal information, or similar term (collectively herein “personal information”). In the course of providing our services, we obtain personal information in the form of business contact information of our customers, suppliers, customers, prospects, and other persons. We also obtain personal information from employees, contractors, applicants, whether current, former, or prospective and, as applicable, family members or designees. We also may obtain personal information about our customers’ end users. Certain personal information that we collect and/or process from any of these persons, including from our customers about their end users, may include information that is considered “special” or “sensitive” data under applicable law.
We are required to comply with local, state, federal, and foreign laws and regulations pertaining to the collection, storage, transmission, transferring, processing, and security of personal information. Regulators around the globe, and in countries in which we operate, have promulgated and are continuing to adopt laws, implementing regulations, and guidance pertaining to the collection, storage, transmission, transferring, processing, and security of personal information. The applicability of these laws, regulations, and guidance is continually evolving, sometimes uncertain, and in some circumstances, conflicting between and among jurisdictions. Although certain of these laws are not applicable to business contact information or employee data, these laws still remain pertinent to our operations. Further, regulators are continuing to propose and adopt new laws designed to safeguard personal information and to provide additional rights to data subjects. We anticipate that the volume and scope of such laws will increase, and, as a result, our costs and efforts to comply with such laws will increase. It may be costly to implement security or other measures designed to comply with these laws. See “Risk Factors - Unauthorized or improper disclosure of personal information, breach of privacy, whether inadvertent or as the result of a cyber-attack or improperly by our employees, has resulted in liability and could harm us.”
Other Regulations
We are a labor-intensive business that is subject to complex labor and employment laws established by the U.S. Department of Labor, state and local regulatory bodies, and similar regulators outside of the U.S. These regulations govern working conditions, paid time off, workplace safety, wage and hour standards and hiring and employment practices.
Our global operations are subject to various domestic and foreign anti-corruptions mandates, such as the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the U.K. Bribery Act and similar anti-bribery laws in other jurisdictions where we do business.
We have processes in place to support our compliance with these described regulations; but our efforts to comply with these various regulations may cause us to make additional capital and operational expenditures, the cost of which we may not always be able to pass to our clients through our pricing structures, and such additional investments could be material to our results of operations, financial position or cash flows. See “Risk Factors - Our global operations and customers expose us to numerous legal and regulatory requirements.”
Human Capital Resources
We deploy a customer-centric, employee driven culture designed to enable our workforce to do their best work on behalf of our clients. As of June 30, 2023, we had 29,863 employees.
We believe that we have one of the best cultures in the industry. As a testament to our culture, a meaningful portion of our workforce is made up of family, friends and colleagues who were referred to us by our employees. Our culture is distinctive – built by and for the individuals that represent our clients’ brands with each and every contact. Our commitment to those individuals exceeds anything in our industry, as evidenced by our e NPS of 68.
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At the foundation of our culture are three primary principals:
1. Be the best employer in the markets we serve – We provide our employees with immediate opportunities for growth. Day one begins with a view of what is possible at ibex including leadership development and job advancement and our commitment to enriching our employees’ lives. We enable our employees to craft a path for their future early in their tenure with ibex.
2. Employee first culture – Our employees are the lifeblood of our organization. From the tools they use every day to interact with our customers to the services we provide to improve their lives, we put our workforce first in all that we do. Our ability to recruit, engage, motivate and retain is evidenced in the top quadrant performance we deliver to our clients. We are committed to supporting a diverse and inclusive workforce through the entire organization.
3. Highly immersive engagement – Our culture can be seen and felt from the minute you enter one of our centers. From our modern, highly customized and branded sites to our unique celebrations for our frontline talent around the globe, our employee engagement is a key driver of the high agent retention we see across our delivery centers.
Our ongoing development and interest in our people and our culture is what fuels our growth. Our employees are extremely loyal to ibex and are proud to be part of ibex. The investment in our people does not end with our physical locations but transcends into the lives of our workforce.
Our people are at the center of our long-term success and growth-strategy, and we will continue to nurture, enhance, and expand our diversity and values-driven culture. Combining the passion, energy and talents of our global employee base and harnessing that into an industry leading company is at the heart of what we do. The result is performance at the highest levels for our clients that delivers an exceptional CX while accelerating growth and diversification for our business.
Information about our Executive Officers
The following are our executive officers as of September 13, 2023:
Name Age Title
Robert Dechant 61 Chief Executive Officer
Taylor Greenwald 55 Chief Financial Officer
Christy O’Connor 54 Chief Legal Officer and Assistant Secretary
David Afdahl 49 Chief Operating Officer
Julie Casteel 62 Chief Marketing and Strategic Accounts Officer
Jeffrey Cox 54 President, Digital
Bruce Dawson 59 Chief Sales and Client Services Officer
James Ferrato 68 Chief Information and Data Privacy Officer
Paul Inson 59 Chief People Officer
Our executive officers serve at the discretion of our board of directors. There is no family relationship between any executive officer or director. The following information sets forth the business experience for at least the past five years for each of our executive officers.
Mr. Robert Dechant has served as our Chief Executive Officer since July 2019 and as a member of our board since January 2021. From September 2017 to July 2019, Mr. Dechant served as Chief Executive Officer of IBEX Interactive, which included all operations of Ibex (including Ibex Global Solutions, ibex Digital, and ibex CX). From 2015 until 2017, Mr. Dechant served as Chief Executive Officer of Ibex Global Solutions. From 2012 until 2015, Mr. Dechant served as the Chief Sales, Marketing and Client Services Officer at Qualfon, Inc., a global provider of call center, back office, and business process outsourcing services. Prior to that, Mr. Dechant was the Chief Marketing and Operations Officer at Stream Global Services, a large multinational business process outsourcing provider which merged with Convergys in 2014. Mr. Dechant holds a B.S. degree from Fairfield University.
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Mr. Taylor Greenwald joined the Company as our Chief Financial Officer in August 2023. Mr. Greenwald served as the Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Synchronoss Technologies, a software company, from 2021 to 2022. From 2019 to 2021, Mr. Greenwald served as the Chief Financial Officer, Web Presence, of Endurance International Group, an information technology services company. From 2000 to 2019, Mr. Greenwald served in various senior leadership roles with Convergys, a customer service and information management company, including as Senior Vice President, Controller and Chief Accounting Officer from 2012 to 2019. Mr. Greenwald holds an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a B.S. degree in engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Ms. Christy O’Connor has served as our Chief Legal Officer and Assistant Corporate Secretary since March 2018. From 2015 to 2018, Ms. O’Connor worked for Alorica, a provider of customer management outsourcing solutions, specifically as the Chief Legal and Compliance Officer from 2015 through 2017 and as a legal advisor thereafter. From 2014 to 2015, Ms. O’Connor was the General Counsel and Chief Legal Officer at SourceHOV. From 2011 to 2014, Ms. O’Connor was the Deputy General Counsel for Stream Global Services. Ms. O’Connor holds B.A./M.A. degrees from the University of Chicago, a J.D. from St. Mary’s University School of Law and a degree in International Law from the University of Innsbruck.
Mr. David Afdahl has served as our Chief Operating Officer since 2018, where he is responsible for global operations, performance management and financial results. He joined Ibex in 2017 as the Vice President of Operations, responsible for U.S. Operations. Mr. Afdahl has more than 23 years of operational leadership experience within the BPO industry. For seven years, he served as the Managing Director for Xerox Services, where he was responsible for global operations, client management and the overall financial performance. Mr. Afdahl holds a B.A. degree in Anthropology from the University of Maryland.
Ms. Julie Casteel has served as our Chief Sales & Marketing Officer since 2012 and is responsible for expanding new and existing clients. She currently leads the strategy for growth and profitability for Ibex’s largest global clients and is also responsible for the strategic development of the financial services and healthcare vertical markets. Ms. Casteel brings more than 25 years of successful sales and leadership experience within the BPO industry. For over 10 years, from 1998 to 2009, she served as the Executive Vice-President of Global Sales & Marketing at SITEL, where she was responsible for global revenue, client relationship management and the overall company marketing strategy. Ms. Casteel has served on a number of industry boards and has been published in the Economist, The Wall Street Journal and various industry publications. She holds a B.S. degree in Biology from Texas A&M University.
Mr. Jeffrey Cox has served as President of ibex Digital since 2008, when he founded Digital Globe Services Limited. Mr. Cox has over twenty years of wireless and cable sales and operations experience and has held executive position in sales channel development and execution, on and off-line marketing programs and call center sales and operations for some of the world’s most recognized brands. Mr. Cox holds a B.A. degree from San Diego State University.
Mr. Bruce Dawson has served as our Chief Sales and Client Services Officer since 2017. From 2016 until 2017, he held the same role for Ibex Global Solutions, Inc. From 2014 until 2016, Mr. Dawson served as U.S. Nearshore Regional Director for Atento S.A. Prior to joining Atento S.A., Mr. Dawson served at SITEL Corporation from October 2012 to March 2014 and Stream Global Services from October 2008 to August 2012. Mr. Dawson has held management positions at various companies in the BPO industry, bringing experience from the software and telecommunications sector. He holds a B.A. degree in psychology from Denison University.
Mr. James Ferrato has served as our Chief Information and Privacy Officer since December 2015. From 2014 to 2015, Mr. Ferrato served as the Chief Information Officer for Ipacesetters, LLC, a teleservices business process outsourcing company. From 2011 to 2014, Mr. Ferrato was the Chief Information Officer for Accent Marketing, a member of the MDC Partners Inc. network and provider of multi-channel customer engagement solutions. Mr. Ferrato served as the Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President for Protocol Marketing, a marketing services company, from 2006 to 2011. Mr. Ferrato holds a B.S. in general business administration from the University of Rhode Island and an M.B.A. from Boston University.
Mr. Paul Inson has served as our Chief People Officer since October 2016. From 2013 to 2016, Mr. Inson served as the Vice President, Human Resources Service Delivery for Sykes Enterprises, a global provider of customer management outsourcing solutions. From 2007 to 2013, Mr. Inson served as the Vice President, Human Resources at Alpine Access. From 2006 to 2007, Mr. Inson served as the Head of Staffing/Recruitment for Capgemini Americas Outsourcing. Mr. Inson holds a B.B.A. degree from the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
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