Wipro Technologies, which started offering financial services only from the early part of the current millennium and has to, therefore, catch-up with peers such as TCS, Infosys and Cognizant, has outlined an eight-point programme to ensure that it performs better than its competitors.

Wipro is already on the path, Mr Soumitro Ghosh, Senior Vice-President, Financial Solutions, Wipro Technologies, told Business Line . “In the last quarter, BFSI was the strongest performer and this division was up 6.2 per cent sequentially while competitors were showing growth in the 4.5-5.5 per cent range,” he said.

But this said, Wipro, a late entrant in the financial services segment — it started offering financial services from 2001-02, as compared to companies like Infosys which have been around in this field since the late 90s — has struggled to keep this division contributing around 26-27 per cent to the kitty, while TCS, and Cognizant have leveraged this better and have financial services contributing over 40 per cent to revenues. Infosys gets over 34 per cent from this segment.

Commenting on this, Mr Ghosh said that Wipro wanted to use various strategies to boost Financial Services' revenues, including getting new deals. “In the April - June 2011 quarter, we won two deals totalling $500 million,” said Mr Ghosh.

The company is also trying to get deals in the regulatory compliance space. Explaining this, Mr Ghosh said, “Earlier, you had two buckets, namely 'run-the-bank' (maintenance spending) and ‘change the bank' (discretionary spending), but now we also have a third bucket, namely regulatory compliance. We see this as an opportunity.”

Plans to compete with its peers

Sub-verticalisation: Involves splitting verticals; for example, insurance gets broken into life insurance and general insurance

New services: Mobility, analytics and cloud are technologies around which new services can be built

Existing services: Wipro also plans to improve existing services like infrastructure and BPO

Large deals: Wipro wants to get more $100 million plus deals

Mega gamma growth: Make BFSI one of the top contributors in Wipro. The unit has around five of the top 10 Wipro accounts

New accounts: Many established banks work with companies like Infosys and TCS, with whom they have deep bonds, but Wipro is trying to get niche deals

Emerging geographies: The company has identified ASEAN, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand and India as areas of focus

Acquisitions: This will help the company get competencies and clients

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