TCS sees BFSI growth story sustainable in medium term

Country’s largest IT services company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), bouyed by its BFSI turnaround in the first quarter of FY19, has said the growth of the vertical is sustainable at least in the medium term as the banking, financial services & insurance sector has moved from compliance phase to growth trajectory, worldwide.

After experiencing sluggish growth for the last eight quarters, the BFSI vertical of TCS has recorded a 3.7% growth in Q1 FY19, thus contributing largely to the topline growth of the company in the recently released earning performance.

Speaking to a select group of media persons in Chennai on Tuesday, K Krithivasan, president (BFSI), TCS, said the company had invested in the Business 4.0, which is helping the customers to leverage new technologies like cloud, analytics, automation, artificial intelligence, IoT and blockchain.

“Based on our investments, banks are now interested in growth and transformation and are finding our solution resonating very well, which is contributing to our growth. And we believe that the growth we are seeing today is sustainable at least in the medium term,” he said.

Reasoning the confidence about the growth of the vertical, he said this particular quarter (Q1), the segment had attracted a lot of attention for good reasons. One, there was a shift of mindset from compliance to growth and that was the key driver. Second, the technologies are enabling banks to come up with new products and services

“We see them launching some large programmes in payments, AI, conversational systems, cyber security, cloud, etc. There was a wide variety in how clients were approaching their technology investments.

“Banks that are focusing on leveraging technology for growth and transformation are engaging with us very strongly because of our investment in cloud, AI and automation,” he said.

According to him, there was a slackness in the BFSI sector earlier because banks were focused more on compliance and were under regulatory pressures. A lot of efforts was going towards cost optimisation. Some banks were also focusing on work force transformation, which was taking the attention away from growth.

“What we find today was that many of the banks globally, particularly the US banks, are making enormous profits. At the same time, the regulatory pressure was also coming down in a big way and an eased tax regime was also making them think about future growth,” he said.

BFSI vertical contributes close to 40% to TCS’s overall revenue.

Ravi Vishwanathan, chief marketing officer, TCS, said the company has been investing in creating digital as every business is looking at digital as a springboard. “TCS is one of the three largest IT services brands in the world and the fastest growing among them, which had been valued at over $10 billion. We have made investments in our digital labs in Chennai, Siruseri campus across all verticals like banking and retail,” he said.