BPO covers a wide range of services-call centers, medical transcription, data digitization, revenue accounting, data processing, web content development, and animation. Enterprises around the world are focusing their investment on their core business processes and are increasingly looking at outsourcing their non-core business processes. Given this, the BPO companies try to reduce their expenses by ensuring various cost reduction initiatives, quality initiatives, and process improvements in the company.

Finance and Accounting Outsourcing (FAO) is one of the fastest growing outsourcing segments in the world. India, which is the frontrunner and most desired BPO destination, has not yet capitalized on the same. Indian players are primarily into voice-based processes, which are at the lower end of the outsourcing value chain. Now that India has established herself as a credible BPO brand, it is important for Indian companies to leverage on the same and exploit BPO opportunities like FAO to the maximum.

The paper attempts a detailed study of FAO space through industry landscaping, competitor analysis and process mapping. The study attempts to establish a business rationale for companies to outsource their FAO to an offshore location like India. The study further, aims at an opportunity mapping in the FAO space for an established company in India by way of identifying its capabilities for catering to such services globally."21^st century organizations need to be flexible enough to adjust quickly to changing market conditions, lean enough to beat any competitor's price, innovative enough to keep its products and services technologically fresh, and dedicated enough to deliver maximum quality and customer service" (Hammer and Champy, 2001).

A comprehensive look at the challenges faced by 21^st century organizations highlights the importance of developing and sustaining competitive advantage. The ability to effectively utilize available resources, while focusing upon one's core competency, ensures a profitable value proposition. Enterprises around the world are focusing their investment on their core business process and are increasingly looking at outsourcing their non-core business processes. As defined by Gartner Group, Business Process Outsourcing is the delegation of one or more business processes to an external provider who, in turn, owns, administers, and manages the selected process, based upon defined and measurable performance metrics to improve overall business performance (http://www.outsource2them .com/rubrique_en.php3?id_rubrique=22). In other words, as per Price Waterhouse Coopers, it is the "long-term contracting of Non-core critical business processes to an outside provider to help achieve increased shareholder value" (http://www. boimauritius.com). Though often overvalued as the panacea to many challenges faced by organizations, outsourcing does provide substantial benefits especially in terms of cost savings and competitive advantage.

Outsourcing of Finance and Accounting Operations, FAO, Business Process Outsourcing, BPO, Information Technology sectore, ITES, Human resources segment, HP, IBM, Perot, Wipro, Project management, Fast mooving consumer goods, FMCG, Global market, Acquiring.