TCS dedicates facility to banking, financial services

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has announced that it has dedicated its 2 lakh sq ft development centre in Sholinganallur, IT corridor of Chennai, to its banking and financial services practice.

Though the company has a dedicated facility for banking and financial services vertical in Bangalore, a major portion of the financial services work will be done out of this banking and financial services solution centre (BFSSC).

This is the third dedicated facility of the company after its insurance solution centre and IT infrastructure and BPO solution centres in Chennai. The company will soon announce formal dedication of its two other facilities in Chennai to retail and telecom verticals.

At present, about 25 major global clients in banking and financial services practice are handled out of the Chennai facility. There are currently 3,200 professionals working in this practice in Chennai to provide IT services to these clients.

The company plans to add about 1,750 more professionals in this vertical alone in Chennai by the end of March 2007. Of the total new hiring, 60 per cent will be fresh graduates. This recruiting will be part of TCS' plan to add 8000 professionals during this year, taking the total staff strength in Chennai to 22,500 by the end of this financial year. It had earlier said that about 70-80 per cent of the professionals would be hired for banking, financial services and insurance and retail verticals.

Addressing a press conference, Ravi Viswanathan, vice-president and head of Chennai operations, Tata Consultancy Services, said Chennai continued the key location for TCS in terms of growth and bringing in projects around the company's core verticals like banking and financial services and insurance. These three segments, put together, account for 43 per cent of TCS' revenue.

R Krishnan, head (banking competency group), TCS, said banking and financial services verticalised delivery centre was a fundamental shift in the way the company organised itself to think, engineer and deliver solutions to the specific group of homogeneous clients.

BFSSC is equipped with self-contained secure client-specific modules, demo labs for products, ATM testing labs, certification centres and domain training centres, among others.

The company will be investing about Rs 6 crore in capacity enhancement and other non-IT infrastructure expansion in the centre.

TCS will also be investing Rs 1.5 crore in ATM testing labs, which will be set up in collaboration with one of its clients.

As part of this initiative, it will set up six ATMs and will scale up the number to 100 ATMs. This is mainly intended to test the application across multiple technologies and to de-risk the new application roll-out on ATMs.

K Krithivasan, head - banking and financial services solution centre, TCS, said the company would be engaging about 1,800 professionals to carry out the work for a major deal ($500 million) it bagged a couple of months back from a US-based financial institution that has lot of retail activities.

It has already ramped up the headcount to 1,200 for this five-year application development and maintenance contract. However, the company declined to divulge the client's name.