Visas processes made easier in the UAE as BLS eyes growth

As travel opens up, the need for passports and visas are rising among UAE residents. BLS International, an outsourcing service provider for embassies and governments that operates 5,500 plus visa-processing centres across more than 65 countries, is keeping pace with the demand. In an interview, the company's Joint Managing Director Shikhar Aggarwal said visa processing times have been cut in the UAE with the innovative use of technology. Excerpts from the interview.

Now that travel is back, and with your stock rising 15 per cent or more in India, what are your plans for expansion globally?

China and Russia, two of the key locations for us, are still not as open as we would like them to be. Despite this, we are seeing higher sales from the remaining geographies and achieving pre-Covid levels of revenues. Once travel in these two countries open up fully, our revenues should get a significant boost.

Moreover, contracts for several countries are in the process of re-tendering in the next 6–9 months, which present substantial opportunities to expand our footprint. We are exploring other opportunities with governments in addition to the visa services we provide.

Are there new investors coming on board? Nomura has been active?

There definitely seems to be increased interest in our company from the capital markets community, as the number of requests from both investors and analyst communities has increased. However, as a part of our stringent compliance practices, details of any new potential investors are not disclosed beforehand. The recent investment from Nomura was based on its conviction in our company.

How many visa processing centres do you have globally? Any new additions?

BLS has about 15,500 plus visa-processing centres across more than 65 countries. The Company has more than 1,00,000 customer service points (CSPs) across India for its Banking Correspondence (BC) segment and e-Governance services. We expanded our CSPs’ network recently with the acquisition of Zero Mass Pvt Ltd.

What innovations/improvements have you made for visa services in the UAE?

BLS has a fully functional centre with dedicated manpower deployed in the UAE to process visas for the countries for which we have visa contracts. We have upgraded our custom-developed software technology to efficiently and securely process these visas and have drastically reduced the waiting time through improvement in operations and customer service

Have you hired more staff in the UAE and other GCC countries to keep pace with demand?

Yes, we provide lots of visa and passport processing services from home for the convenience of our customers. They are assisted, of course, by a BLS team member who goes to their homes to guide them through the entire application process.