Port-of-Spain has been ranked the fifth top val­ue Des­ti­na­tion for busi­ness process out­sourc­ing (BPO) in the Latin Amer­i­ca and Caribbean re­gion.

The rank­ing was re­leased this week on the Nearshore Val­ue In­dex (NVI) 2024, a tool man­aged by the re­search and ad­vi­so­ry team of Nearshore Amer­i­c­as, a promi­nent on­line con­tent source for the nearshore ser­vices and out­sourc­ing in­dus­try.

A state­ment from In­vesTT ex­plained that the NVI iden­ti­fies and ranks the lo­ca­tions which of­fer the best val­ue for nearshore op­er­a­tions in BPO and soft­ware ser­vices.

Sek­ou Al­leyne, pres­i­dent of In­vesTT, said busi­ness­es in­di­cat­ed that their main rea­sons for se­lect­ing T&T in­clud­ed a read­i­ly avail­able and ed­u­cat­ed Eng­lish-speak­ing labour force, com­pet­i­tive labour costs, ge­o­graph­ic lo­ca­tion be­low the hur­ri­cane belt, a dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture that fa­cil­i­tates work-from-home mod­els and of course the nearshore ad­van­tage of prox­im­i­ty to North Amer­i­ca.

Ac­cord­ing to Nearshore, the des­ti­na­tions show­cased in the NVI 2024 were se­lect­ed from 41 can­di­dates which in­clud­ed cities, states and whole coun­tries.

Rank­ing above Port-of-Spain are Guatemala City, Mon­tego Bay, Medellin and Be­lize City in that or­der.

Al­leyne not­ed, “This is cer­tain­ly a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone and a huge in­di­ca­tion of the coun­try’s grow­ing com­pet­i­tive­ness in BPO. As the na­tion­al in­vest­ment pro­mo­tion agency, In­vesTT has placed great fo­cus on de­vel­op­ing the lo­cal BPO in­dus­try and over a pe­ri­od of nine years we have been con­sis­tent­ly record­ing the suc­cess of our hard work­ing fa­cil­i­ta­tion teams.

“Since we at­tract­ed our first con­tact cen­tre, iQor, from Flori­da to T&T in 2015, we have re­tained the in­vest­ments of sev­en oth­er con­tact cen­tres and BPO op­er­a­tions with an ad­di­tion­al in­vest­ment from Texas ready to be com­plet­ed this month.”

The eval­u­a­tion cri­te­ria ap­plied by Nearshore Amer­i­c­as in­clud­ed costs of labour, pop­u­la­tion size, prox­im­i­ty to the US, ease of do­ing busi­ness, Eng­lish pro­fi­cien­cy, in­vest­ment en­vi­ron­ment and re­al es­tate prices.

Nearshore Amer­i­c­as is a di­vi­sion of Next Coast Me­dia and Mar­ket­ing Ser­vices. It pro­vides in­dus­try news, analy­sis and guid­ance to cus­tomers, in­vestors, ser­vice providers, re­gion­al and coun­try-based in­vest­ment agen­cies and oth­er stake­hold­ers in the nearshore tech­nol­o­gy-ser­vices in­dus­try.