Infosys Technologies has announced the setting up of its first Latin American subsidiary with a development centre at Monterrey in Mexico.

The subsidiary will offer business consulting and software services to clients across verticals, including banking, financial, retail, consumer packaged goods, resource, energy and utilities.

"We are making an upfront investment of $5-10 million in the subsidiary to set up the near-shore facility and an office, with a capacity to house about 250 people, majority of whom will be hired locally," a top company official told.

The Monterrey facility will also provide business process outsourcing (BPO) services, infrastructure management and packaged solutions implementation.

Going forward, the company plans to expand the Latin operations to ramp up its headcount to about 1,000 people over the next 24-36 months.

"We have decided to set shop in Mexico to take advantage of the language skills in the region, its proximity to Canada, the US and Europe. Many of our clients have operations in Latin America, which is emerging as a strong market for our service offerings," Infosys CEO S. Gopalakrishnan said.

Mohit Joshi, who has been with the company's banking and capital markets division, will head the subsidiary.

IANS