I met up last evening with Sriram Srinivasan, SVP and Global head of Banking & Financial Services at Wipro, to have a chat about their recently announced partnership with Geneva-based banking software firm, Temenos (see Temenos spurns Cognizant for Wipro for ASP delivery). The service will initially be hosted on Wipro’s new Dussledorf data centre, acquired as part of a major outsourcing deal with Citibank in Germany announced last August. The ASP service will initially be targeted at small and medium sized banks and new market entrants in Germany and Eastern Europe, though of course Wipro's aspirations extend beyond those markets if successful. Indeed it is even possible we will see a pilot client in the UK.
We also talked about the pros and cons of Wipro building or acquiring its own banking IPR - like Infosys with Finacle and TCS with BaNCS - rather than hosting someone else’s. Certainly the ‘received wisdom’ that owning IPR makes you a more credible player in the banking IT services market does deserve some scrutiny. It is still the case, for example, that Finacle remains a quite separate business unit within Infosys, and does not belong in the new Financial Services & Insurance super-vertical, instead reporting in to the CFO. In fact, Wipro has itself been involved with Finacle implementation projects.
Also joining us was David Taylor, Wipro’s global client partner for a major banking client. I wanted to understand the impact of the recent organisational changes, about which I had been less than overwhelmed (see Wipro reverts to an India-centric world). But I must say, Taylor – who for many years was also ‘on the other side of the fence’ in the banking sector – gave a quite compelling argument on the ‘de-regionalisation’ that Wipro (and it must be said, other peers) has undertaken, in favour of P&L delegation to key account leaders. I will be discussing this more in a future edition of TechMarketView OffshoreViews.
By the way, I am also reliably informed that Cognizant’s relationship with Temenos is very much alive and well, and they remain one of Temenos’ implementation partners. Wipro’s ASP relationship, though, is exclusive for the entire European market.