By Zephrina Cazaubon,
Founder and CEO

We’ve barely opened our doors and I’m already proud of what we’ve accomplished at Ascension BPM.

It’s rare for nearshore outsourcers to be locally owned and managed. Generally, business process outsourcers (BPOs)  or contact center firms based in the United States, Canada, or Europe find favorable markets in the Caribbean, Central or South America and set up their operations to support businesses back home.

This has been the dominant trend for the past 25 years when these firms realized that nearshore markets could compete with the price points and expertise of traditional outsourcing powerhouses, like the Philippines and  India.    

But we’re breaking the mold. Not only are we based in St. Lucia, but we’re also locally owned and managed. As a privately held enterprise, I established Ascension BPM to accomplish two key goals:

• Bring highly trained jobs to St. Lucia.
• Fill a critical expertise and staff gap for our clients.

I grew up in Soufriere, St. Lucia. My family is still there and, rarely do I go a day without meeting someone I knew when I was attending school as a child. I got my first professional job in a bank on Bridge Street in the heart of Soufriere. Today, I own that building and I’m hoping to have more than 300 fellow St. Lucians working there by the end of the year. I have fond memories of working in that bank and it helped chart my career. I realized early that I was good with finances and numbers.

To pursue my career, I had to move to the U.S. where I became an accountant and earned my CPA. I worked for other companies and learned valuable lessons in the business world before I ventured out on my own to establish my own accounting firm. Before long, I bought other accounting firms and helped them grow.  I realized that I had to change the business model of my accounting firms so they could compete against much larger professional services firms and the pandemic laid waste to the labor pool of candidates we could draw upon to conduct the back-office finance & account administrative services we were offering.

St. Lucia was the answer. I hired local talent to support my businesses in the U.S.

Not only was St. Lucia the answer to our business challenge, but it could also be the solution for other accounting firms and organizations that had internal finance departments.

Ascension BPM was born.

I never lost touch with my roots in St. Lucia. My frequent trips back home reinforced what I knew about the attributes of her people – their commitment to hard work, discipline, and exemplary service. And my goal to establish a business process management outsourcing company blended nicely with the work of Invest St. Lucia which was deploying a strategy to identify the island’s competitive strengths to investors.

“To see a local investor coming into the sector in St. Lucia is very fulfilling,” said  Alana Lansiquot, Senior Manager of Investments at Invest St. Lucia. “And we’re also employing a deliberate strategy to make sure BPO job opportunities can come to areas outside of the traditional north and south of the island. So having this come to an area like Soufriere is very important to us.”

As I said earlier, the mission of Ascension BPO has twofold goals: to provide local careers and to solve business problems.  Our new facility in the heart of Soufriere will be at the center of our ability to deliver a fresh perspective in solving the back-office business and administrative challenges of our clients while also utilizing the expertise of hundreds of local professionals.

In addition to the direct jobs, we hope to create at Ascension BPM, we also know that hundreds of well-paying jobs will have a significant impact on the families of our employees as well as the indirect economic benefits to the local community. A fact not lost on Octavian Charles, CEO of  Invest St. Lucia.

“We believe it is significant that someone outside from the diaspora is returning home to make such a meaningful contribution,” said Mr. Charles. “The benefits are tremendous, employment for residents and to make a dent to unemployment in the area.” 

While I’m proud of the impact Ascension BPM has already had, I’m even more excited about the potential impact we’ll have on the future of hundreds of St. Lucians.