Service bureau

A service bureau is a company which provides business services for a fee. The term has been extensively used to describe technology based services to financial services companies, particularly banks. Customers of service bureaus typically do not have the scale or expertise to incorporate these services in their internal operations and prefer to outsource them to a service bureau. Outsourced payroll services is a commonly provisioned service from a service bureau.

The service bureau's value to its customers is a combination of technology, process and business domain expertise. Their business model is based on their ability to productize their services and deploy them in volume to a very large customer base. In the modern context, technology is a key enabler to achieving this scale.

Most common contemporary technologies that support the service bureau business model are SAAS (Software as a Service) and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). These have been increasingly adopted since 2005 based on the proliferation of software interoperability standards and web services. The evolution of these technologies has led to the resurgence of the service bureau business model which is being increasingly known as Services 2.0.