Narayan AmmachchiGlobal professional services firm KPMG has launched a shared services center in the Jamaican city of Kingston to provide finance and accounting (F&A) as well as human resource (HR) services to its US clients.
The center will initially employee 175 people, with plans to expand the headcount to around 250 by July 2019.
The services the Jamaican center will provide include market research, compliance audits, investigations, and proposal writing, reported Caribbean news portal Loop citing KPMG’s Managing Partner Tarun Handa.
KPMG has long been present in the Caribbean country, but it came as a surprise for the auditing firm to start offering outsourcing services from Jamaica. Industry analysts are optimistic that the shared services center will generate high-paying jobs for Jamaica’s accounting and legal professionals.
Handa has confirmed that the company will train new recruits in the skills necessary to deal with global clients. Over the next two years, KPMG will likely expand the shared services center to Montego Bay, where it already runs an office providing audit and tax advisory services.
Delighted by the KPMG announcement, the Jamaican government has vowed to pay more attention to the growth of the BPO industry, which according to the Prime Minister Andrew Holness, has already employed around 30,000 people on the island.
“The level of analytical work that is required by your shared support service center requires high-level trained staff to do your accounting work, to do your research work, to do your data analytics,” Holness said after the launch of the KPMG center.
“That is what we want to train our human resources here to do, and that is the investment that the Government of Jamaica is willing to make.”
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