Indian IT Services Firms and Financial Core System Development
Abstract
Celent provides advice to financial services firms considering outsourcing core IT systems development to Indian IT vendors.
Indian IT vendors have been at the vanguard of IT outsourcing. However, their main competitive advantage of cost is fast eroding due to the expansion of global service vendors like IBM, Accenture, HP, etc. into India and other low cost countries, and from the newer low cost offshore locations.
Indian IT service vendors have been credited with perfecting the global service delivery process, have served more than half of the top 20 global financial firms, and have played a leadership role in the maturity of the overall global offshore industry. Lack of deep domain expertise in the financial industry meant that they competed mostly for the lower end (in terms of billing rates and services provided) of outsourced IT services during much of the earlier years. Despite this, the vendors experienced high growth, leveraging low costs, high quality execution, technological expertise, and superior process-oriented methodologies.
However, Indian IT vendors dominance in the market is under threat. The expansion of global service vendors like IBM, Accenture, HP, etc. into India and other low cost countries, and from the newer low cost offshore locations is allowing other companies to offer low cost options.
To counter these threats, Indian vendors started aggressively building their business domain expertise around five years ago as a means to provide higher value services and compete effectively with these new market players and gain a larger share of clients' IT budgets.
"Tier 1 Indian vendors have now built proven capabilities in developing and implementing core systems in each of the banking, capital markets, and insurance industries. They have core systems' products that are either the market leaders in their category or that have been implemented for some of the leading financial firms," says Sandeep Hebbar, author of the new Celent report, . In addition, the vendors have started engaging on IT consultancy assignments and winning complex, end-to-end outsourcing contracts.
The report profiles the top five Indian service vendors and the top product-centric vendor in the financial services domain -- Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Technologies Ltd., Wipro Technologies, Satyam Computer Services Ltd., Hindustan Computers Limited Technologies, and i-flex Solutions -- and describes some of the areas where they possess sufficient domain expertise to build core systems and provide BPO services in the financial services domain.
The report is 46 pages long and contains 25 figures and nine tables. A table of contents is available online.
Members of Celent's research services can download the report electronically by clicking on the icon to the left. Non-members should contact info@celent.com for more information.