Continuing its winning streak in Europe, HCL Technologies, India’s fourth-largest information technology (IT) services company, is understood to have bagged a large outsourcing deal from Swiss banking major, Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS). The multi-year contract is estimated to be in the range of $250-300 million, thus making it the largest contract for the company in the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) space.
According to sources in the company, HCL Technologies will deploy about 1,000 professionals to handle this project who will be located across the globe including India. Besides, the company is also setting up an offshore delivery centre (ODC) in Bangalore for UBS, is expected to be operational from April 1.
Industry sources say going by the number of people HCL is planning to deploy for UBS, the contract would fetch the company revenues of anywhere between $50-65 million per annum. In response to email queries by Business standard, spokespersons at UBS and HCL Technologies declined to comment. “We do not comment on rumours,” they said in separate email statements.
Analysts say UBS works on a 100 per cent outsourcing model. The European banking major is already working with many Indian as well as offshore-centric IT services vendors, including Cognizant, Infosys, TCS and Wipro. In 2009, the company had awarded a five-year IT outsourcing contract worth $442 million to Cognizant across IT infrastructure, application development and maintenance and BPO. Among the global vendors, the company also works with Accenture and IBM. It is, however, not clear if the contract awarded to HCL is part of its vendor consolidation process.
Among the top-tier Indian IT services providers, HCL is not as strong as its larger peers, TCS and Infosys, in the BFSI space. In the quarter ended December 31, BFSI contributed a little more than 25 per cent to the overall revenue of HCL, with a year-on-year growth of 21.6 per cent. However, BFSI accounted for 43.3 per cent of TCS’ overall revenue and 35.3 per cent of Infosys’, according to the latest quarter financials.
However, HCL is aggressively increasing focus on BFSI.
Some of the BFSI clients of HCL include Deutsche Bank and Citibank. It has put 600 people for Deutsche Bank, said to be its biggest BFSI client so far. Going by this, UBS is expected to be the biggest BFSI client for the company going forward.
In the recent past, HCL had won a number of deals in Europe, including the Nordic region. In December, it had won a multi-million dollar outsourcing deal from British pharma major AstraZeneca. In the current month, the company announced winning a $300 million contract from Finnish firm UPM, which will be executed over the next five years. Last month, the company had bagged an infrastructure management services contract from Norway-based Statoil.