Banking, fin services segment ahead of co's overall growth:TCS

Allaying concerns regarding demand slowdown in banking and financial services (BFS) vertical, country's largest IT firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) today said the segment continues to grow well and is "ahead of the overall company growth".
Yesterday, TCS' rival Cognizant had given a bleak revenue outlook for the first quarter and 2016, citing a "soft start to the year in banking and financial services, primarily due to macroeconomic concerns".
Banks and financial services firms spend billions of dollars annually on IT infrastructure management, upgradation and renewal, making it one of the most lucrative verticals for IT players globally.
Company's revenues from the BFS industry vertical grew by 15 per cent year-on-year in constant currency terms in calendar year 2015, its CEO and Managing Director N Chandrasekaran told PTI.

The growth in the BFS vertical was driven by TCS' strong participation in customers' digital spending, he added.
TCS gets about 40.5 per cent of its revenues from BFS and insurance segments.

On the other hand, overall revenues grew 13.5 per cent on a constant currency revenue basis in 2015, representing absolute incremental revenue of USD 2.025 billion, he said.
On organic basis, TCS' constant currency revenue addition of USD 1.85 billion is the highest in the industry in 2015, Chandrasekaran said.
"Our deep domain expertise, our investments in digital, our software products in the BFS vertical combined with our capabilities in operations and technology presents a very compelling, full suite of services to customers, harnessing the power of digital technologies to solve their business problems and deliver real value," he added.

Cognizant, while announcing its financial results for 2015, said it expects negligible change in revenues for January-March of 2016 from the preceding quarter and 9.9-14.3 per cent growth for the entire 2016.
While this is in line with Indian IT industry body Nasscom's estimates of 10-12 per cent growth for 2016-17, it is lower than Cognizant's own 21 per cent growth it clocked in 2015.
However, Cognizant said it believes that the overall demand environment continues to be strong and it has a healthy pipeline.
Through this appointment, Travelport has significantly
rationalised the number of third party IT development companies it works with, resulting in both a concentration of spend and increased domain knowledge expertise as well as creating additional funding for strategic research and development projects (R&D). At the same time, Travelport is also consolidating its wholly-owned US operations into two centres of excellence in Atlanta and Denver.

Commenting on the appointment, Gordon Wilson, Travelport's President and CEO, said, "The purpose of our heightened investment in technology is all about bringing new, innovative products and solutions to market even faster to meet the needs of our customers around the world. This forms an integral part of our overall growth plan and long term strategy as we continue to redefine travel commerce and differentiate ourselves in the areas of airline merchandising, hotel distribution, mobile and B2B payments."
Wilson continued, "We already have a deep relationship with TCS based on our positive track record of working together in the past. This, together with the unsurpassed level of senior engagement TCS has always shown us, means that they now have a very clear understanding of our long term strategic goals and how best to work with us in order to take full advantage of the significant opportunities that lie ahead for our business. In particular, they will be a great partner to our global technology organisation as we drive positive change in how we handle in-house development in our US technology hubs and service the needs of our customers even faster. Working closely together on data and analytics is another good example of the sort of extended engagement we intend to have with them going forward.