Our history

From Telesmart to TLScontact 

TLScontact started out as Telesmart, providing internet hosting services to the French Embassy in China. As the Embassy faced the new challenge of processing an increasing number of visas for Chinese tourists wanting to visit France, Telesmart became TLScontact, harnessing its technological know-how to develop an end-to-end solution for visa application management.  

We opened our first Visa Application Centre in 2007, in Beijing, before creating new French Visa Application Centres across China over the following 5 years. In parallel, we gradually expanded westwards, opening Visa Application Centres on behalf of the French government and other countries from the Schengen Area, in the Maghreb and the Middle East. 

TLScontact becomes part of Teleperformance Group 

In 2013, TLScontact became a wholly owned subsidiary of  Teleperformance Group, the global leader in customer experience management. This gave us additional scale, helped us to enhance our digital and data security capabilities and allowed us to benefit from the Group’s unmatched customer service expertise.   

Continuous international expansion 

In 2014, TLScontact was awarded the contract to manage visa applications to the UK in Europe, Russian Federation & Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Middle East, Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa. Today, we operate 150 Visa Application Centres around the world, on behalf of the UK, France and a number of other governments in the Schengen Area and beyond.

As the world evolves, our core visa processing service evolves with it and today we can apply our expertise to a wide range of government and citizen services. Advancing technology enhances and optimises the services we deliver and enables us to continue developing the solutions our government clients can expect from us tomorrow.