Fidelity National Information Services Inc. says it hopes to expand the services it offers to lenders and to cut costs by expanding its operations in India.
Jeffrey S. Carbiener, an executive vice president and the chief financial officer of the Jacksonville, Fla., technology vendor, said it also intends to take advantage of other emerging markets, such as Brazil, where Fidelity opened an operation last year.
"We're building scale," Mr. Carbiener said in an interview Monday.
Fidelity announced last week that it had bought Second Foundation Inc. in Menlo Park, Calif., a specialist in data systems integration that has a staff of more than 600 and a major development center in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh.
It said it would integrate Second Foundation into its captive offshore unit, Fidelity Business Solutions India Private Ltd., which already manages the company's work with Covansys Corp., a Farmington Hills, Mich., data processing outsourcer that has been 29%-owned by Fidelity since 2004 and has operations in Bangalore. The latter city is in southern India.
Mr. Carbiener estimated that roughly 30% of Fidelity's India work is business-process outsourcing and 70% is professional services such as software development.
The company hopes to use India's low-cost work force to expand the services it offers to mortgage lenders, for example. He said 35 of the 50 largest U.S. mortgage servicers use Fidelity's shared processing platform but that most of these lenders keep customer-facing functions in-house, including what he called the "customer support desk."
As refinancing volumes decline, however, Fidelity sees a chance to pick up outsourcing work from the servicers, Mr. Carbiener said. He would not discuss prospective customers, saying only, "We have some proposals out in the marketplace."
Last March, Fidelity formed a joint venture, Fidelity Processadora e Servicios SA, with two big Brazilian banks, Banco Bradesco SA and Banco ABN Amro Real, a unit of the Dutch company ABN Amro Holding NV, to do card processing. It later bought a company there to do check processing and business-process outsourcing.
Overall, Fidelity said, it now has 2,000 jobs offshore, including about 600 people in the Philippines. It has customers in 60 countries.
