Recognition lags behind the economic power of the BSC sector

Working for a business service centre is no different than any other office job in Slovakia.

“You are just doing it in a different language, for a different market, but you are doing the same thing that you would do for any Slovak company,” said Martin Bednár, vice-chair of the Business Service Center Forum (BSCF), an industry association running under the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Slovakia.

The sector of business service centres (BSCs) has grown into the country’s third-largest industry when it comes to the number of people it employs and a significant contributor of funds to the state coffers. As the sector has developed, BSCs have moved away from their image of lots of people confined in crowded office spaces answering clients' requests or entering numbers into excel charts. Nowadays, an increasing number of people in the sector are highly qualified people performing sophisticated tasks in various fields and roles with a regional or even global impact, according to Bednár.

“On the other hand, it may have made some of the explanations of what these roles are more difficult,” he admitted.

Despite the changing perception, the representatives of Slovakia’s BSCs admit they still struggle to make this sector more visible. This starts with such basics as the need to officially recognise the sector as a separate industry in statistics.

“Without the proper awareness of the sector, there probably will not be targeted help or economic support,” said Peter Rusiňák, AmCham senior policy manager and BSCF coordinator.

Sector’s standing in the national economy grows