Offshore Number Crunching.

• Author: Luxner, Larry
• Position: Brief Article

WHEN ENTITLES as diverse as United Parcel Service, Deutsche Telekom, and the Worldwide Wrestling Association need to file financial statements for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, their 10-Ks, 10-Qs, and other reports often take an electronic hop through Barbados.

R.R. Donnelley Financial Barbados is a division of New York-based R.R. Donnelley Financial, a $600 million company. It employs 185 workers--most of them women--to process different file formats and prepare them for various media, from print-based typesetting to ASCII data formatting.

"Our operations started here in 1986," says general manager Ed Olivares. "At that time, it was a pre-press facility, where we processed film for publishing books. In 1994, the book business unit was downsized, and the financial business unit was inaugurated."

The facility that Olivares supervises, an eighteen-thousand-square-foot plant within Wildey Industrial Estates just outside Bridgetown, hums twenty-four-hours a day.

"New work is sent to us by clients in standard word-processing applications and spreadsheet files. We consolidate the different formats into a uniform format for posting onto the Internet, for filing with regulatory agencies or for final print applications."

Says company spokeswoman Judy Poole: "Our overriding objective is the ability to maintain quality, security, and speed. When you're dealing with financial markets, those factors are everything."

Barbados clearly wants to lure more companies like Donnelley to its shores. Reginald R. Farley, the island's minister of industry and international business, says 166-square-mile Barbados--whose manufacturing sector has remained relatively stagnant for years--has nonetheless managed to attract several topnotch information technology (IT) firms. In the beginning, these companies did simple data entry but are now moving into higher value-added forms of IT such as credit-card transactions, medical insurance claims processing, and software development.

"Geography no longer matters with high-tech," Farley says, adding that the IT and financial service sectors today employ twenty-five hundred Bajans, or 2 percent of the island's...