American Express is believed to be on the lookout for buyers for its travel-related services portion of its India based BPO unit. This could pretty much be the beginning of AmEx ultimately selling off its entire captive operations in India.

AmEx essentially provides services, including back-office support, travel-related services, credit cards, accounting, customer care and related processes for the company’s worldwide operations for its clients says a report in the Economic Times.

It is estimated that AmEx BPO employs about 7000 people with about 500 of that working in the travel-services BPO, though AmEx has never publicly announced its employee figures.

If ths sale were to come through, AmEx will follow on the footsteps of MNCs such as Aviva, GE, British Airways and Conseco, all of which decided it was cheaper to outsource the work to specialist providers of back-office and customer care services the paper said.