The project
Who the client is, what the investor journey looks like, where your desk sits inside it, and how the two organisations are governed for twenty-four months.
The client and the mandate
Akontec's client is an India-inbound investment advisory group that guides foreign corporates and funds through the process of establishing and capitalising an Indian entity. It holds the licensed relationships — chartered accountants, company secretaries, legal counsel, authorised dealer banks — and it carries the professional liability for every filing that leaves its office.
What it does not hold is capacity. Investor volume arrives in waves tied to fiscal years, trade delegations and sector announcements, and the advisory bench cannot flex to meet it. The result is the failure mode every advisory firm knows: partners doing follow-up work, documents sitting in inboxes for a week, and investors who lose confidence somewhere between the term sheet and the FC-GPR.
Akontec's mandate is to build and hold a permanent operational desk against that volume, and to place the delivery of it with one BPO service provider under a managed contract. The client deals with Akontec. Akontec deals with you. You never carry a commercial relationship with the end client, and you never carry professional liability for advice.
The desk has been running in a reduced form inside the client's own office for eleven months, which is why the process manual, route matrix and document checklists already exist and are not being written from scratch against your go-live date. What is being outsourced is a proven process at a larger scale, not an experiment.
The investor journey, stage by stage
Seven stages from first contact to the desk closing the file. Your seats own the stages marked as desk-owned; the panel owns the rest and your desk coordinates around them.
| Stage | What happens | Owner | Typical elapsed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 — Enquiry | Investor makes contact through the client's site, a delegation, a bank referral or an existing relationship. Logged, acknowledged, assigned. | Desk | Same day |
| 2 — Pre-screening | Sector, entity type, origin country and intended structure checked against the route matrix. Automatic route or government route determined, or escalated. | Desk | 2–4 days |
| 3 — Structuring | Entity form, shareholding pattern and capitalisation route decided with the investor. Professional advice; the desk schedules, records and follows up. | Panel | 2–6 weeks |
| 4 — Documentation | The full pack assembled: KYC, apostilled corporate documents, board resolutions, valuation certificate, bank letters. Chased to completeness. | Desk | 3–8 weeks |
| 5 — Incorporation & approvals | Entity registered, PAN, TAN, GST, state approvals, SEZ or industrial land allotment where applicable. | Panel | 4–10 weeks |
| 6 — Inward remittance & reporting | Funds received, FIRC and KYC report collected from the AD bank, FC-GPR prepared within the RBI window. | Panel, desk prepares | 30 days from receipt |
| 7 — Post-investment | Annual FLA return reminders, repatriation and dividend queries, amendments, share transfers, second and third tranches. | Desk | Ongoing |
| Enquiry to funds received | Median across the client's last two years | 5–7 months | |
Why the long cycle is good news for you
A five-to-seven month journey means a file opened in April is still generating desk activity in October. Your seats are not chasing fresh volume every morning to stay busy — they are working a book that accumulates. By month four of the contract, the majority of daily activity comes from files opened before that month, which is what makes the workload predictable and the roster stable.
It also means the desk is judged on completion rates and turnaround, not on daily call counts. That is a healthier measurement regime for your agents, and it is why the incentive slabs in Schedule C are built on quality, throughput and investor experience rather than on volume handled.
The advisory boundary
The single most important operating rule on this desk, and the reason it can be trained in three weeks.
Your desk does
- Collect — take the investor's facts, documents and instructions and record them accurately.
- Verify against a checklist — confirm a document is present, legible, current, correctly signed and correctly attested.
- Read back published positions — sector caps, route classifications and timelines that already sit in the approved route matrix, quoted as written.
- Coordinate — schedule, chase, remind, minute and escalate.
- Report — status, ageing, exceptions and the audit trail.
Your desk never
- Advises on structure — which entity form, which route, which jurisdiction, which shareholding pattern.
- Interprets — a regulation, a press note or a sector cap beyond what the matrix states verbatim.
- Confirms a filing — that anything has been accepted, approved or is compliant.
- Comments on valuation, tax or repatriation outcomes in any form, including informally.
- Commits a timeline for a panel-owned or authority-owned stage.
Every agent signs an acknowledgement of this boundary at certification, and it is tested in the certification assessment. A breach is a documented quality event: first instance is retraining, second is removal from the process. This is not a technicality — the client's professional indemnity depends on it, and so does the exclusivity of your allocation.
How the two organisations run together
Governance is deliberately light but fixed. Akontec appoints a named process owner for the term who is your single point of contact for anything operational, commercial or escalatory. You appoint an operations manager with equivalent authority. Neither side routes business through anyone else.
There is one scheduled call a week for thirty minutes covering the ageing report, exceptions and any change requests in flight. There is one monthly governance review covering the scorecard, the invoice reconciliation, hiring and attrition, and the training pipeline. There is one quarterly business review with commercial attendance on both sides, at which the retention release, the scale position and any rate-card change are settled.
Everything else is exception-driven. Akontec does not sit on your floor, does not manage your people and does not set your rosters beyond the coverage window in Schedule B. What Akontec does hold is the process, the quality bar and the client relationship, and it will act quickly on all three.
Ready to look at the work in detail?
Schedule B breaks the ten workstreams down to task level, with the exclusions, the quality framework and the reporting pack the desk produces every week.