Incoho

Incoho Inc. (www.incohoinc.ph) is a new start-up based in Chicago with a production location in the Philippines. Incoho is a new BPO (business process outsourcing) firm focused on the working capital and receivables management needs of its clients. Benedict Buhain and Rene Huergas, CEO and VP-Operations, respectively, partnered with a couple of Yanks based in Chicago when they saw a huge opportunity.

The opportunity is the collection of consumer debt, where total US debt is in excess of $18 trillion (that’s right, a "t" not a "b"). Of this amount, approximately $135 billion has been outsourced to third-party collection companies. The debt-collection industry in the US generated $13 billion last year and continues to grow at 24 percent annually. If they get it right, getting one-tenth of one-percent slice would be $13.5 million or in excess of P600 million.

Ben and Rene are seasoned Silicon Valley executives who saw the inherent advantages of hiring local talent for the US market. With intelligent customer touches, the Philippines presents a clear labor arbitrage over US-based production locations. They also saw the clear and present advantages of locating at the Hatchasia Globalcity Center (shameless plug alert!!). Their growth projections are phenomenal with a customer care team of 25 today; they expect to be at 75 by yearend.

My Two Cents: Watch out for this team, low-profile, high performers!

Religion and IT

It must be a major dilemma for the Catholic Church that the Internet is both an efficient tool to spread the Lord’s word and a major source of irritation since it is also a major source of sex-related content.

Well, the Church is fighting back! It recently launched CBCP World Corp., a partnership with the Transpacific Broadcast Group International (TBGI). Using a VSAT platform, they have built a VPN (virtual private network) that will protect church surfers from immoral sites. Not an ordinary ISP, CBCP World has put in state-of-the-art technology for its servers, firewalls and network.

In fact, I was told by a reliable source that the Church is pulling together the management side of this project. The Jesuits will manage the website. About 2,000 nuns will manage the chat rooms. The Philippines has approximately 1,500 Catholic high schools and 2,200 parishes. Can you imagine how big a project this can be when they connect to this VPN? I was also told that this is the first in the Catholic world and maybe a prototype for scaling worldwide.

My Two Cents: TBGI did it right; partner with the Big Guy up there and you can’t go wrong!

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Dickson Co is CFO (C is for Cheap) for both Dfnn and HatchAsia.com. For comments or suggestions, e-mail [email protected].