How a single company ‘silently’ took over the world of visa processing in an age of record migration

VFS Global dominates the international visa outsourcing market.

The company, whose acronym stands for Visa Facilitation Services, has grown from being the first of its kind with a single visa office in Mumbai, India two decades ago to a global juggernaut with more than 3,500 visa application centres in 141 countries representing the interests of 65 “client governments.”
VFS Global’s website says it has processed more than 240 million visa applications since 2001 and collected close to 110 million sets of biometric data (fingerprints and photos) since 2007.
One hundred and sixty-two Canadian visa centres in 109 countries run by VFS Global handle millions of visa applications each year. A 2018 press release from the company said Canada had the “most extensive” network of visa centres in the world.
That all changed in 2001 when Indian entrepreneur Zubin Karkaria persuaded the U.S. government to let him run a pilot project handling the administrative side of visa processing at its Mumbai consulate.
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