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In an exclusive conversation with Shikhar Aggarwal, Joint Managing Director of BLS International, he shares his visionary outlook for the company as it continues to redefine global visa and consular services. With operations in over 60 countries, Aggarwal highlights BLS International’s commitment to customer centricity, technological innovation, and strategic expansion. From deploying AI chatbots and facial biometrics to streamlining visa processes to forging strong partnerships with governments and diplomatic missions, the company is leveraging cutting-edge solutions to enhance efficiency and trust.
How would you define your core vision for the company’s future? What leadership philosophies guide your approach to managing a global organisation like BLS International?
The company’s core vision is to deliver exceptional services that consistently exceed customer expectations and foster long-term satisfaction. We prioritise understanding and addressing the distinct needs of our clients and visa applicants. Customer-centricity is not just a principle for us; it is ingrained in our culture, evident in our personalised approach, swift responsiveness and ongoing enhancements informed by feedback and insights. The key philosophies guiding us is our commitment to consistently provide outstanding customer experiences, nurturing enduring partnerships grounded in trust, contentment and shared achievements. Through the implementation of clearly defined processes, our goal is to optimise service delivery and elevate the overall customer experience.
What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned while steering BLS International through rapid growth and global expansion?
Over the last few years, BLS International has witnessed rapid growth and global expansion driven by both organic and inorganic routes. This extraordinary journey for BLS International is filled with valuable lessons that have shaped our strategy and vision for the company. Some of the key learnings include:
- Adaptability: In a dynamic global market, the ability to adapt quickly to changing regulations, customer needs, and market conditions has been crucial. Our transition to a self-managed modes is a testament to this adaptability, enabling us to enhance efficiency across various aspects and profitability at the company level.
- Strategic Acquisitions to drive future Growth: Acquisitions have been a cornerstone of our growth strategy. By integrating complementary businesses, such as iDATA, Citizenship Invest, and Aadifidelis, we’ve expanded our geographical reach and diversified our service offerings, creating new opportunities for stakeholders to create value.
- Customer-Centric Approach: Understanding and addressing the unique needs of our clients and travellers across different regions has been instrumental in building trust and long-term relationships.
- Resilience and Teamwork: Navigating challenges, such as the global pandemic, underscored the importance of resilience and the collective strength of our team. Together, we’ve turned obstacles into opportunities, emerging stronger and more focused.
As we continue to grow, these lessons remain at the heart of our strategy, guiding us toward a future of sustained success and innovation.
BLS International has been a key player in visa, passport, consular, and citizen services. How is the company leveraging technology to enhance these offerings?
Technology is central to BLS operations, and we have been constantly working on introducing path breaking technologies such as AI chatbots and facial biometrics to streamline end-to-end workflows from document verification to biometric authentication. This not only enhances efficiency but also reduces manual intervention, minimising errors and speeding up processing times. These AI-powered agents and chatbots provide instant, round-the-clock assistance to users and help them through each step in real time—via both voice and text. Such an approach ensures greater clarity, fewer rejections, and a more seamless experience overall. The entire process becomes accessible with just a few clicks, eliminating unnecessary complexities.
What role do AI and automation play in improving customer experience and service efficiency?
Our goal at BLS International is to use AI to revolutionise visa and consular services so that we can provide quality services to our clients with greater efficiency. These new generation tools allow companies to provide immediate, multilingual assistance for passport and visa enquiries. They also provide excellence assistance in preparing documentation and this results in significantly lower response time on their applications.
As a result, the whole process becomes more efficient. Besides increasing processing speed, these solutions also help strengthening system transparency and trust. Following the increased usage of automation, the streamlining of repetitive tasks, the need for large physical infrastructure and manual processing reduces significantly. This shift will allow organisations like ours to increase capacity and enhance service delivery without a linear increase in resources.
BLS International operates in over 60 countries. What strategies have helped build trust and credibility with foreign governments and missions?
The key strategy that have helped building trust and credibility is the company’s efforts to set global standards by delivering excellent outsourced visa and passport services, front-end citizen services, consular and passport services, verification, and attestation services. Our expertise in handling administrative and non-judgmental interventions related to these services for diplomatic missions helped in winning their trust. It is good for them also as it enables them to concentrate more on visa application assessments.
Providing excellent process-driven services is at the core of our offerings. As the trend to outsource visa and consular services has been increasing, we are at the sweet spot to take advantage of it. Drawing upon our capabilities and expertise in the visa and consular services, we have expanded our businesses and operations to offer quality services to many foreign governments.
Can you share any upcoming initiatives that aim to ease the visa application process for Indian and international tourists?
At BLS International we are always focused on technology integration and is pioneering a suite of AI and digital technology-driven products specifically designed to redefine visa and consular services for client governments and customers. Moreover, with international travel rebounding strongly, we are effectively navigating the evolving landscape by expanding our service offerings, optimising operations, and strengthening partnerships with governments and diplomatic missions worldwide. The company’s innovative approach and customer-centric solutions is played a key role in handling the increasing demand for visa and consular services and also helping Indian and foreign by streamlining the whole process.
What are your top priorities for BLS International over the next 2–3 years?
At BLS International, integrating technology to offer quality services is going to be our top priorities over the next 2-3 years. At our end, we are taking all sorts of measures to make visa processing smooth for the applicant. We are leveraging cutting-edge technologies to streamline visa processing, enhancing security and user experience. Going forward, our key priority is to further integrate upcoming technologies such as facial biometric verification with liveliness detection in our operations. This will help the company to ensure secure identity confirmation via real-time video recording and advanced document verification.
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