Teleperformance Brand Guidelines: A 1978 Paris Call-Centre Firm That Became TP

A telephone-marketing firm that went abroad early.

Teleperformance began in Paris in 1978, when Daniel Julien set up the company, according to both English and French Wikipedia; French Wikipedia, citing Les Échos in 2005, also names Jacques Berrebi, Christophe Allard and Olivier Douce as founders. French Wikipedia says the business was France’s leading call-centre operator within eight years, and that it opened its first foreign subsidiaries, in Belgium and Italy, in 1986.

The corporate structure took longer to settle. In 1989 Julien and Berrebi joined forces in Rochefortaise Communication, the listed parent of Teleperformance International; the two companies merged in 1999 as SR.Teleperformance, which took the name Teleperformance in 2006, French Wikipedia says. Expansion followed in stages: subsidiaries across Europe from the late 1980s, a United States arm in the early 1990s, centres in the Philippines and Singapore from 1996, and Argentina, Brazil and Mexico between 1998 and 2002.

Acquisitions did much of the rest. In August 2010 the BBC reported that Teleperformance had bought beCogent, a Scottish contact-centre business with about 2,000 staff and its largest site in Airdrie; the company said the deal made it the second-largest operator of outsourced contact centres in the UK. English Wikipedia lists later purchases including Aegis USA in 2014 and the interpreting company LanguageLine Solutions in 2016, and French Wikipedia adds Intelenet of India in 2018, the deal it links with the group’s move into back-office work and the moderation of online content.

The group grew large. In March 2021 the Guardian described Teleperformance as employing about 380,000 people in 34 countries. Its shares joined the CAC 40, the index of the largest companies listed in Paris, in June 2020 and left it in September 2025, when Euronext took its place, French Wikipedia says.

From Teleperformance to TP.

The short name came before the formal one. In September 2018 Teleperformance unveiled a new brand identity and logo that used its abbreviation, “TP,” across its updated visual material and website; Outsource Accelerator reported the change on 6 September 2018, quoting Daniel Julien, then chairman and chief executive, as saying the brand reflected a “resolutely modern, global and digital group.” The Brazilian branding agency Ana Couto lists the Teleperformance repositioning among its case studies and says it created the new positioning, identity, campaign and website, along with the tagline “each interaction matters.”

On 27 February 2025 the company went further. A post on its own website that day said it was “officially” adopting TP as its brand, and read the two letters as pairs of ideas: technology and touch powering partnerships, transformation driving performance, and thought fuelling passion. French Wikipedia dates the change of name to February 2025. The website now describes TP as a “global digital business services company” and presents its AI platform as TP.ai.

The range of services has widened with the name. TP’s website lists customer experience and support, “trust and safety” (its term for content moderation and fraud prevention), collection services, back-office work, data services and analytics, and technology services. It says it serves about 170 countries, has a presence in about 100 and works in more than 400 languages and dialects. It also says it is among the first companies to hold ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification for AI management, issued by BSI, and gives its Great Place to Work rankings a prominent place.

Leadership changed in 2026. English Wikipedia, citing TP’s 2025 annual results, published in February 2026, says Daniel Julien stepped back from his executive role to become a strategic adviser, and that Jorge Amar was appointed group chief executive; Moulay Hafid Elalamy chairs the board.

How outsourcers present themselves.

Customer-experience and business-process outsourcing companies sell work that is mostly invisible: the call answered, the chat handled, the post reviewed, the invoice processed. Their branding has to make that work look human and dependable, and the sector has settled on a familiar visual vocabulary to do it.

The first element is people. Websites and recruitment pages lean on photographs of smiling agents in headsets, often in bright open-plan centres, alongside employee-wellbeing imagery and team events. The pictures speak to two audiences at once: clients who want reassurance about quality, and the large numbers of job-seekers these companies hire. Pages built around a company’s own workplace rankings, such as Great Place to Work lists, serve the same double purpose.

The second element is reach. World maps dotted with delivery sites, counts of countries and languages, and lists of client sectors appear across the category, because scale and geographic spread are much of what is being sold. In recent years a third element has joined them: chat bubbles, abstract network lines and illustrations of AI assistants, as companies present their services as a mix of people and software rather than headcount alone. Several now display AI-governance certifications, such as ISO/IEC 42001, as prominently as their awards.

Trust signals complete the picture: analyst-ranking badges, industry awards and appearances at trade events such as Customer Contact Week. Because many of these companies have grown through mergers, their identities are also unusually changeable, with familiar names shortened, combined or replaced. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it and how its name and identity have changed — and marks what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Luxembourg rival, and labour practices under scrutiny.

TP’s largest recent purchase was Majorel, the Luxembourg-registered customer-experience group whose main shareholders were the German media company Bertelsmann and Morocco’s Saham. TP’s public offer for Majorel ran through the second half of 2023. In a statement dated 3 November 2023, TP said that once a second settlement took place on 8 November it would hold about 99.91% of Majorel’s shares, and that it would squeeze out the remaining holders and delist Majorel from Euronext Amsterdam in December. On 2 January 2024 Nearshore Americas reported that TP had become Majorel’s full owner, with Bertelsmann and Saham exchanging their holdings for a stake of about 4% in TP. French Wikipedia says the deal added countries including Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Togo and Ghana to the group.

Labour practices have drawn repeated scrutiny. In March 2021 the Guardian reported that some home-working staff had been told that webcams linked to an AI system would check for breaches of work rules; the company told the paper the scans would not be used in the UK. In April 2023 the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that TP had signed an agreement, announced by the union federation UNI Global, guaranteeing its roughly 40,000 workers in Colombia the right to form a union. The Bureau had earlier reported, with TIME, on conditions for content moderators in the country.

For a design guide, Teleperformance shows how a large service company can shrink its name to initials and let the letters carry a story the company writes for them. Compare Concentrix, the US group that merged with Webhelp in 2023, and Foundever, another customer-experience outsourcer. For this guide we use a deep plum, a muted rose and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Teleperformance’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.