UKvisas and WorldBridge Streamline Visa Applications
Jamaican Visa Application Center was first to launch, in May 2007.
Committed to helping secure the UK borders, CSC and UKvisas — a joint UK Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office directorate — are streamlining the visa application process. It now includes access to a free Web site, user-pay call centers and 16 Visa Application Centers (VACs).
Under the WorldBridge Service banner, created specifically for this five-year business process outsourcing contract, CSC is establishing VACs in three regions — Europe, the Americas, and Middle East & North Africa. When the first VAC launched in Jamaica on May 31, 2007, it successfully processed 90 applications on opening day. Thirty more sites are scheduled to open in these three regions before November 2007.
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"Applicants can submit their applications, have their supporting documents checked, pay for their applications and provide their biometric data," explains Richard Shakespeare, CSC solution director on the UKvisas account. Once the applicants’ data has been entered in the system, the applications are then handed off to the appropriate embassy, where the decision of whether or not to grant a visa is made — WorldBridge’s role is to offer information only, not advice.
Acting as an intermediary If the visa officer at an embassy needs to interview the applicant, WorldBridge will broker that service as well. Applicants can then track the status of their applications either online or via the call center, by using a unique identification number. Depending upon the complexity of an applicant’s situation, the timeline for applying for and receiving a visa will vary from same-day to weeks or months.
To eliminate the need for traveling long distances to the nearest full-service VAC, WorldBridge is establishing 15 Micro-VACs in many large cities. These Micro-VACs will be set up as biometric enrollment facilities, specifically for those applicants who have already visited the Web site to apply and pay for a visa application.
With UKvisas and WorldBridge expecting to process 700,000 applications in the first year of operations — followed by an annual growth rate of about eight percent — the system needs to work, regardless of location.
One-size-fits-all business model "The message from UKvisas was, ’We want consistency,’" says Shakespeare. "So we wanted to build a VAC-in-a-box model." And now that Jamaica is up and running, "we’ve created a template for producing a VAC, which includes hundreds and hundreds of physical processing procedures."
All regions have their own challenges. In the Middle East, CSC is starting from scratch, with no operations or staff. Europe is heavily legislated, with stringent rules for setting up retail facilities. And some countries require more extensive physical security surrounding their buildings than others.
Once infrastructure systems and capabilities are successfully in place, this business model can be replicated in other markets worldwide.
"Governments will naturally move away from local processing to hub processing," says Shakespeare. "And then it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to think of other types of retail-facing BPOs that this kind of template can be used for, like passport applications and tax returns."
"We’re delighted to be working with UKvisas," adds CSC’s John Aspinall, UKvisas account director. "We’ve leveraged all of our knowledge and expertise to provide the most effective way to help UKvisas achieve the critically important goal of border security."
