Salmat has announced Business Process Outsourcing revenue was down 7.4% for the 2009/10 financial year, blaming an industry-wide drop in bulk mail volumes. Across the company, earnings before interest, tax and amortisation (EBITA) increasing by 17.3% on the prior year to $A91.2 million.

Salmat’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) division sends more than 1.2 billion ‘essential’ mail packs every year and provides both outbound and inbound services for large corporate clients.

Salmat Chief Financial Officer, Chad Barton said, ”While print and mail volumes were lower than anticipated, we do not expect the same rate of decrease in the current year and already have a solid line up of new work that supports this view.

“Further benefits will be realised from the major Victorian site merger that has just taken place, as well as a number of other optimisation programs.

“Salmat has been developing its traditional scanning and archive services to incorporate more sophisticated workflow processing. This is aimed at developing ongoing, end-to-end solution-based work such as online marking and accounts payable processing. While significantly underway, we intend to expand our presence in these markets further,” said Barton.

“Our Philippines infrastructure, established in September 2009, performed very well, providing valuable support services to the BPO division as a whole. We will continue to draw on the capabilities of this facility in the future, as this provides an excellent infrastructure for expanding the outsourced BPO services we can now offer our Australian clients,” said Barton, who also flagged expansion into new solution offerings for the Salmat business.

“In BPO for example, the workflow services ... offer solutions for sophisticated, multiple-step work, such as accounts payable, claims management and other back office processes. Where we might have previously handled just part of the process, our new offering enables us to take on the end-to-end application and most importantly it leverages our existing infrastructure and available resources.

“Next is expanding into new markets including the Small to Medium Enterprise space. While we’ve traditionally focussed more on the high-volume, large-scale corporates, we are adapting many of our services to better suit the SME client, delivering the same sort of benefits and competitive advantages enjoyed by our larger clients. A great example of this is the upcoming launch of our ‘local area marketing’ solution, incorporating a self service web portal for SME clients that allows them to access Salmat’s suite of multi-channel communication solutions.”

Salmat already provides end-to end claims management workflow to a number of Health Insurers through the HealthStream partnership with Dataract and Civica.

It also provide accounts payable scanning and data capture services to many companies and are currently rolling-out end-to-end accounts payable invoice processing workflow as a software as a service (SaaS) model.

Salmat will be building on these current capabilities and other back-office workflow services including loans processing, purchase management and electronic mailroom.

The company also said it is actively reviewing a number of acquision opportunities “to both strengthen our existing services as well as extend our one to one communication model.”