Global Finance: What are the most important aspects of being a CFO in the BPO industry?

Anusha Ramraj: The strategic role of a CFO has grown in importance in every industry. The CFO needs to own the numbers by guiding and communicating with stakeholders. Explicitly in BPO, strategic planning is vital and involves aligning financial goals with vendor selection, contract negotiations and pricing structures. Managing cash flow is crucial—as is risk management, considering the diverse geographies, data and compliance requirements of CCI. Mitigating risks like fines, penalties and currency fluctuations is essential, especially for global operations.

GF: Labor quality is crucial across various industries, especially in Business Process Outsourcing, where services rely heavily on workers. What distinguishes your labor pool, and how does it benefit your clients?

Ramraj: We focus on impact sourcing, and partner with CareerBox Africa, a not-for-profit organization. Here, we identify and provide unique training and job opportunities to young candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds in Africa, placing them into contact-center digital jobs and focusing on black and female empowerment. In South Africa, for instance, nearly 80% of our employees are black, with 76% to 78% of them being female. With an emphasis on diversity and inclusion, our focus is to not only empower women who may face barriers to workforce entry but also enrich the communities where they reside.

GF: What keeps you up at night?

Ramraj: Compliance. It’s not that I’m noncompliant; I ensure full compliance. Maintaining operational continuity is crucial. As a CFO, while overseeing the financial well-being of the business, navigating through increased governance, regulations and compliance in an ever-changing global environment is paramount. Ensuring ongoing compliance is imperative, as any lapse could have a significant impact on the business. CCI is multinational across sub-Saharan Africa—we are on 17 contact center sites across the continent at this point, and this comes with its own compliance challenges.

GF: How important are environmental, social, and governance [ESG] goals for your company?

Ramraj: Our ESG framework is centered around our “CCI Cares�initiatives, with several areas of focus. These include our commitment to the environment through sustainability projects covering reforestation in Africa, such as our “One Job One Tree�project; measuring emission footprints; promoting carpooling for employees due to the impact on the environment; the implementation of better-quality water; recycling; working toward green contact-center buildings and other solar initiatives. But most importantly, we are committed to African society—supporting various community projects, for example, and improving schools by providing better water, sanitation, equipment, training and food programs.

GF: What is your economic outlook of Africa?

Ramraj: Africa faces many challenges but it also offers numerous opportunities in sectors such as infrastructure, mining, natural resources, education and finance. Africa is one of the largest continents, with the youngest population, and its youth population is an incredible resource. Before investing, companies must conduct thorough research to understand the business environment and potential opportunities. CFOs play a crucial role in shaping this reality through investment considerations and decisions.

Global Finance: What is the state of case law around generative artificial intelligence (AI) and its derivative products? Writers are filing lawsuits against companies behind the largest generative AI engines for not getting permission to use their content for training purposes. Where are we in the game?

Devika Kornbacher: The New York Times case is the seminal case that everybody’s paying attention to. The complaint and defenses have changed. Any foundational model needs something to be trained on to be useful—that’s just a fact. If you train it on a small universe, that’s all it’s going to give you. If your goal is to have accurate, fulsome, smart generative AI, you need to train it on everything, but then there’s the issue of intellectual property (IP), copyright and compensation. We have to fight this out to figure out the rules.

GF: How does the lack of case law affect innovation of generative AI?

Kornbacher: That’s our challenge. There’s a lot of regulation that’s not in force yet, like the EU AI Act. Those looking to innovate technology have moved on and are playing by their own rules. While there are parts of the world that decide to restrain innovation through subpoenas, other parts of the world are afraid they’ll fall behind. China already has regulation, innovation and a plan. In other countries, there’s a dissonance between case law, regulation and innovation.

GF: Is there a country that’s more like the Wild West with regards to technology innovation, meaning there’s little regulation?

Kornbacher: Some would argue the US is the Wild West when it comes to innovation—everybody’s doing everything—but we have some enforcement. Another area from a legislative perspective is China. China has shown more decisiveness in how to run the race while the rest of the world is still thinking about how we should run it. China has regulations and rules that are in effect, and told people to go develop the technology. Meanwhile, Europe, the US, and other parts of Asia are still trying to figure out that balance.

GF: As companies develop their technology, they try to understand how business and regulation is different when they cross borders. What are the key issues for companies in this area?

Kornbacher: There’s the fear of missing out because one company will see what another company is doing, and they race to stay in the game. When it comes to generative AI in particular—because companies have been using AI as machine learning and analytics for some time—the fear is top of mind. In reality, however, most are in the same spot. Many of the companies that are publicly talking about their technology don’t have a viable version in production yet.

GF: Is AI regulation worthwhile? What might be the reason for not having any regulation?

Kornbacher: From a regulatory perspective, you can’t develop a global solution that dictates what the whole world needs to do because every government works differently.

GF: What are the types of global regulation we could see going forward? What tech risks does this bring?

Kornbacher: The idea of global regulation or a treaty of some sort—I don’t see that happening imminently. There are global principles that are starting to take shape around accountability, safety and transparency that then make their way into the local regulations or even local enforcement.

GF: There was a big decline in merger activity over the past few years because of the economy, not regulation. But now the tables are turning, and it seems that tech regulation is standing in the way of some deals. How do you balance the need for regulation and for more dealmaking activity?

Kornbacher: During the dot-com bubble, every small startup was valued at $1 billion, and these were all going to change the world, but then the bubble burst. We went from that world to tech consolidation, the behemoths, Big Tech.

And there always appears to be more on the way. ByteDance’s product pipeline rests on a specially designed shared services platform, geared to quickly deploy the right resources to the right project and get the resulting product out of the shop fast, that has attracted wide admiration including a 2022 analysis by Harvard Business Review.

But much of ByteDance’s rapid success—it only opened its doors a dozen years ago—could be in jeopardy if it finds TikTok locked out of the US by act of Congress. Speculation is rife about the future of the mega-popular video hosting service if it loses that market. It is already banned in over a dozen countries, from Afghanistan and India to the Netherlands and Taiwan; in February, the EU opened a formal investigation of its presence in Europe.

“Because of the potential of a ban, ByteDance is between a rock and a hard place for either placing an initial public offering or continuing to raise money privately,â€?Yang says. “The US has the largest audience, but it’s important not just because if the sheer numbers but because it’s potentially the most valuable market given the lifetime value of its customers.â€?/p> Douyin is still ByteDance’s biggest cash cow, but it is already used by close to half of China’s people, Yang notes, and so probably will not grow as rapidly going forward. Given the decline in consumer sentiment in the country, Douyin’s revenue growth could slow down. That puts more weight on the US in the eyes of investors; a curtailment in that market would make an IPO, which once looked like a logical next step for ByteDance, a tougher sell, Yang says. It’s been argued that a ban on TikTok could be less of a catastrophe than predicted for its creator; in China, many users of prohibited foreign apps access them via virtual private networks anyway. But while VPNs could keep many if not most of TikTok’s current US users on board, Yang notes that they would add several steps for prospective new users looking to sign up and build user habit, and hence could slow future US growth: still not a good look for an IPO candidate. Additionally, should Congress pass an anti-TikTok bill, ByteDance will probably fight the legislation in court; while it might ultimately win on First Amendment grounds, the price would likely be years in legal limbo and another de-inducement to would-be backers. Just how much of a negative a US ban would be to ByteDance’s long-term prospects is debatable, Ouwehand counters. E-commerce is a key component of the company’s long-term strategy, and it has had rapid success building its TikTok Shop platform into the app; in just a few years, he predicts, it could surpass Amazon globally, if not in the US. Meanwhile, the slow pace of action on TikTok’s status in Washington gives ByteDance time to figure out its next move. “If a sale is forced, ByeDance will find a way to structure it so that it benefits them,â€?he predicts. Besides, the company has found ways around such dilemmas in the past; when TikTok was banned in Indonesia, he notes, it turned around and purchased that big market’s largest e-commerce platform.

Even people who know the company well have faulted ByteDance’s public and government relations strategy for letting matters get to this point, however. “The US is still a small portion of a big, global company, and they didn’t prioritize it for too long,�Ouwehand says. “I think they should be campaigning there every day.�/p> TikTok’s troubles in the US go back at least to 2020, when then-President Donald Trump ordered ByteDance to divest the app. The incoming Biden administration reversed the decision. The company responded by spending $1.5 billion to launch “Project Texas,�which transferred all of TikTok’s U.S. user data to Oracle servers located in Austin. That was a misreading of the problem, charges Yang; ByteDance was attempting to address a geopolitical problem through a technical fix that convinced none of its Washington critics. Efforts to find a US owner for TikTok only beg the question of how “American�the app needs to become to satisfy Congress—which hasn’t yet passed a bill defining this—and ignore Beijing’s firmly stated unwillingness to let TikTok’s valuable algorithm fall into foreign hands. “At the heart of the issue, China/Bytedance will never allow the source code to be sold to a U.S. tech company, in our view, which makes this all a spiderweb issue for any potential strategic buyer,�Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities, told Nikkei Asia last month. For ByteDance, then, much rides on its ability to lobby Congress and regulators not to shut down its biggest product in its most strategically important market, not least the future of its next stream of new products. In February, it launched Coze, a rival to Chat GPT in generative AI. Earlier, it was reported that the company was recruiting American talent for new initiatives in natural sciences and drug development. And in March, ByteDance announced that it was starting to incubate new online games, after having shut down an earlier effort. Normally, the question would be whether any of these projects would be linked to TikTok in some way; the app is now a news source, not just an entertainment hub. But with the app’s future—at least in part—in the hands of Congress, the larger issue is whether ByteDance can continue to attract the capital it needs to keep innovating, both through TikTok and investors drawn to it.

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