KENT Reliance Building Society has saved £1million by setting up its own company in India, it can be revealed.

The mutual previously outsourced processes to a contractor. Now it has taken a further step and created a wholly-owned subsidiary, EasiProcess.

More than 30 graduates, several with Masters in Business Administration, have been taken on. There is space in its R T Nagar offices to double that number over the next few years.

The typical salary of a processor is £1,500, with more for extra responsibility.

All EasiProcess staff spend time in Chatham while senior Chatham-based employees work regularly in Bangalore.

Kent Reliance, the fastest-growing society in the UK, is also using a Chennai company to design its new website, saving £45,000.

The society has come under fire for switching jobs from its Chatham base in Sun Pier. But Mike Lazenby, chief executive, strenuously defends the decision.

He said: "We couldn’t recruit enough quality staff in Chatham or the surrounding areas of the right calibre of experience to do the business for us, certainly not at a price we could afford.

"We discovered in Bangalore people who were better educated and definitely had a better mindset.

"Saving money was a secondary objective, but in the last year we saved £1million, so that’s a million good reasons why we should be here."

It enabled the society to maintain competitive rates for savers and borrowers and at a time of intense competitive pressure as well as building society mergers – the Portman recently gobbled up the Lambeth – it helped secure Kent Reliance’s future, Mr Lazenby added.

Owning the company gave Kent Reliance greater control and no one had been made redundant at Sun Pier.

Mr Lazenby said that more processes would be moved to India over the next few months.

His long-term goal was to cover all the society’s costs by revenue from clients using its process services, something never before achieved by a building society.

"We’d like to be margin neutral in five years’ time. Nobody has done this in the industry. 'We don’t want to take one penny from one member to cover our costs."

* Full reports on Kent Reliance’s Indian operation in May’s Kent Business.