HQ location: Mumbai, India
Number of employees: 202,039
NG Subramaniam, President
Tata Consultancy Services is on a mission to help banks grow again.
That's a turn around from just a couple of years ago, when the company earned its bread and butter helping banks digest the many mergers and acquisitions that they undertook or that were thrust upon them during the financial crisis.
But in 2010 and 2011, TCS has found that banks are willing to spend again, especially on systems that will help them modernize and offer more customer engagement by smartphone, electronic tablet, the Internet and the cloud. The new regulatory environment poses additional challenges that create further opportunities for TCS.
The Mumbai, India, company, which earned the No. 3 spot in this year's ranking, advanced from fourth place in 2010, and had total revenue of $7.8 billion, 44% of which comes from financial services companies.
"If you look at the latter part of 2010 and 2011, banks were focusing on growth and efficiency together," says N. Ganapathy Subramaniam, the president of TCS Financial Solutions, a unit of TCS. "During the financial crisis, everyone was talking about efficiency and belt tightening."
Subramaniam says TCS Financial Solutions was busy "decommissioning and recommissioning systems" as well as migrating data from the old systems to the new.
Today, TCS is all about helping its bank clients update and strengthen relationships with their customers.
"I am seeing with [TCS and] all [information technology] service providers a focus on being able to tell a vertical story, and especially within banking to go even deeper with the processes they offer," says Madhavi Mantha, principal and head of banking research at Novarica.
In the past year, for example, TCS helped Deutsche Bank AG shift to the latest version of the TCS core banking platform, replacing disparate core platforms in 30 different countries. That in turn has meant increased efficiency and deeper customer relationships for the bank as well as an ability to tackle markets quickly with relevant products, Subramaniam says.
The TCS core system supports savings accounts, checking accounts, overdraft accounts, term deposit accounts and a variety of lending products including personal loans, corporate loans and mortgages, along with a full complement of transactional services incorporating remittances, foreign exchange, drafts, banker's checks, cards and trade finance. These capabilities are accessible through multiple channels, from branch to call center to mobile banking and Web.
TCS also has a customer account application and tracking feature that lets customers begin an application in one channel and pick it up in another, without having to start over.
TCS helped SEI Investments, which provides trading capabilities for more than 7,000 private banks, financial advisors and institutional investors, develop a global wealth management platform that offers a unified suite of products in 12 countries, 27 currencies and on 53 exchanges.
TCS sees growth opportunities in the challenging regulatory environment. It has dedicated a work group to tracking the changes brought by the Dodd-Frank Act and the Durbin amendment.
Among the challenges are new needs that require more transparency in operations as well as more complex risk management, security oversight and more internal reporting capabilities.
As TCS looks to the next couple of years, it plans to help banks implement technologies that are just now coming into their own, including mobile devices, tablets and the cloud.
That means developing highly scalable platforms that can help banks with the sudden increase in the number of transactions and more complex security needs that such volume brings.
