BFSI: An India-centric special scenario

Two up, two down

Four of the India-centric vendors share similar assessments of IT investments, predicting they will improve behind spend from larger-enterprise banking clients, with growth in digital implementations, mobility, and modernization of legacy IT infrastructures and applications portfolios. The divergence in performance in 2Q18 likely reflects one-time or short-term changes at large clients and not a strategic shift for any single vendor. From TBR’s quarterly analysis:

• Infosys’ (NYSE: INFY) revenue expanded 6.8% in USD year-to-year to $2.83 billion during the quarter but was flat sequentially due to softness in its largest vertical, Financial Services. With 40% of large-scale deals in 2Q18 stemming from Financial Services clients, we expect vertical performance to rebound and bolster Infosys’ overall performance. While Infosys experienced softness among a few key accounts within Financial Services, the vertical continued to generate the largest percentage of sales, at 31.8% in 2Q18, as the company benefits from its platform-centric portfolio and “as a Service” solutions portfolio. In addition to Finacle-related deals, an uptick in demand among insurance clients, similar to the deal win with John Hancock, is driving McCamish platform adoption.
• In recent quarters, Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH) has noted some acceleration in initial projects to map out blockchain implementations for banking and financial services clients. In fact, Cognizant has described the banking industry as the most mature sector regarding blockchain implementation, while insurers and retail companies are somewhat behind their banking counterparts and other industries are still in trial phases. Financial Services sales rose 4.5% year-to-year in 2Q18 as Cognizant’s slowly expanding pipeline of new business with banks and financial services clients began to translate into new revenue streams.
• Banking, Financial Services and Insurance growth slowed for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to 5.3% year-to-year in 2Q18, from 6.9% in 1Q18, though TCS executives noted improving IT investment trends among U.S.-based financial institutions, saying they believe the recent slowdown in IT spend has “bottomed out.” TBR believes TCS’ open-based banking API framework enabling banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) clients to expedite digital transformations is resonating increasingly well. TCS’ massive, $2 billion digital transformation award with Transamerica (won in January) continues to spool up while growth among banking institutions in Europe and APAC remains strong.