Zubin Karkaria, founder and chief executive of VFS Global, has said passport penetration in India remains below 10%, describing the country's emerging middle class and first-time travellers as a major growth opportunity for the visa outsourcing industry.
"If you just look at a market like India, the passport penetration is less than 10%. So, look at the new middle class that will emerge and the first-time travellers," Karkaria told NDTV's Rahul Kanwal in Walk The Talk, held at VFS Global's headquarters in Dubai.
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Karkaria, whose company completes 25 years of operations this year, said VFS was "made in India," having started with three offices in 2001.
"Today we are working with 71 governments, physically present in 169 countries, with 4,500 visa application centres, the number one in its space," he said, adding the firm now processes around 32 million visa applications a year.
On the wider outsourcing opportunity, Karkaria said 60% of the global visa and passport business was still not outsourced.
"There's a huge ramp way upwards for outsourcing," he said, pointing to a growing shift of Indian student travellers towards destinations such as Germany, Austria and Spain, alongside traditional markets like the US, UK, Canada and Australia.
On concerns that VFS's premium lounges amount to upselling, Karkaria said 90% of the company's business came through travel agents and tour operators rather than walk-ins. "We don't nudge people," he said, adding that most premium services were booked online before applicants arrived at a centre.
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He also addressed data privacy concerns following reports questioning VFS's handling of biometric information for European governments.
"Reality is that we don't keep any data. You put your passport, on a click of a button, once it's done, it's pushed real time online to the server of the embassy," he said, adding that limited personal details such as name, phone number and address were retained only briefly to return passports before being automatically purged.
Karkaria said VFS was investing about $100 million annually in technology, including artificial intelligence tools built on an in-house large language model, to detect fraud and prevent bots from blocking appointment slots meant for genuine travellers.
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