TCS upstages Accenture in financial services

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) looks set to overtake Accenture in terms of revenue in the banking, financial services & insurance (BFSI) segment -- the segment that is the biggest, and often also the fastest adopter of information technology .

India's largest IT services provider is now literally breathing down the consulting and outsourcing company's neck. Among the leading companies, Cognizant has grown the fastest in the segment in the past few years, but its revenue still is over $1.6 billion behind those of Accenture and TCS. IBM stopped giving vertical numbers from 2014, so it's not clear where it stands now.

In the past two quarters, TCS had $3.48 billion in revenue from BFSI, while Accenture had $3.50 billion, a difference of just $20 million in six months. The catch up has been fast over the past three years, despite Accenture's strong consulting-led expertise in mining banking accounts. In 2013, Accenture's BFSI revenue at $6.2 billion was $610 million more than TCS's. The following year, the gap reduced to $400 million, and in 2015, it was sharply down at $70 million. (Accenture follows a September to August financial year, so the calendar year figures used for Accenture are actually December to November. But that does not change the trend).

Some analysts say the trend is a reflection of how the two companies approach BFSI. Accenture, which counts JP Morgan and Citigroup as customers, has a big focus on what is called change-the-bank (CTB) initiatives, under which it helps banks generate new streams of revenue leveraging disruptive business models. For instance, it recently tied up with Digital Asset Holdings to help institutions assess and implement blockchain-related solutions. TCS, on the other hand, focuses on Run The-Bank (RTB) services, where the idea is to maximize efficiencies, save costs and increase profitability. Banks have traditionally spent more on RTB-related IT.

Jimit Arora, head of Everest Group's financial services practice, said that TCS is now also becoming strong in CTB, even as it expands its RTB mandates.

Phil Fersht, CEO of USbased HfS Research, said TCS has been moving up the value chain and taking on complex IT projects for clients, especially in the application development and infrastructure spaces. The company, he said, has actively leveraged its business process services (BPS) and its core banking platform Bancs to increase momentum in the BFSI space. “TCS is very BFSI-centric,“ he said. TCS, which counts UBS, Citi and Royal Bank of Scotland as customers, gets 40% of its revenue from BFSI, while Accenture gets a little over 20% from fi nancial services.

But analysts also caution that given the dramatic changes in technology today -- automation, analytics, cloud and cognitive computing are fundamentally changing how services are delivered -- current trends may not be a predictor of future ones.“These forces are cannibalistic to the existing book of business and companies need to manage the transition carefully as they seek to take share from incumbents.It is a very hard balancing act,“ said Arora.

Bozhidar Hristov, senior analyst at Technology Business Review (TBR), said that as BFSI and other industries go through transformation driven by embedding digitally-enabled services and solutions, Accenture's aggressive investments in horizontal solutions, paired with the company's industry consulting prowess, positions it better for long-term growth.