Multi-million and multi-year deals are back- both for first-timers and mature outsourcers

With IT budgets tightening and global uncertainties rising, multi-million,

multi-year outsourcing deals are making a comeback.

Srinivas Rao, Executive Vice President & Chief Business Officer, LTIMindtree spells out the contours of IT outsourcing in a climate of tightened IT Budgets, geo-political turmoil and emergence of new hot regions beyond staple segments like the USA and Europe. Are Indian IT Majors adapting fast with new offerings, regional pivots and niche practice-verticals? Let’s find out.

LTIMindtree has recently inked a multi-million dollar contract extension with Absa Bank- an African financial services group. How crucial are such contract renewals?

These contract renewals are extremely critical for organisations like LTIMindtree as it demonstrates continued partnership with our strategic clients. They also help in exploring opportunities for further optimisation and enhanced business value for our clients while maintaining steady and predictable business for us.

We are seeing an increased flow of multi-million and multi-year deals in areas of business transformation and cost optimisation.

Are multi-million and multi-year deals back in the IT landscape?

We are seeing an increased flow of multi-million and multi-year deals in areas of business transformation and cost optimisation both from matured outsourcers and firms outsourcing for the first time.

Any specific lessons that you are picking from other BFSI clients?

The enhanced offerings that we take to our clients are based on our learnings from various global clients both within BFSI sector and other industries. In particular the use of transformational technologies like GenAI which help in providing enhanced customer experience to the end client while improving productivity and reducing total cost of operations for our clients.

Can you share something more on the idea behind, and the success of, Banking Transformation Practice (BTP)?

BTP will play a huge part in our BFSI growth story. Today, our clients look for an end-to-end solution for their key business imperatives and that requires us to bring in our collective expertise in platforms, services and operations. On the back of a large acquisition that we did few years back, we decided to bring all of our BFS platform expertise within one practice called BTP. This will help us in making appropriate investment in building further capabilities and offering a true end-to-end solution to our clients.

What’s your unique formula for BFSI as a segment?

BFSI clients have always been at the forefront of using cutting-edge technology solutions to drive business outcomes and bring in efficiencies in their operations. BFSI contributes to roughly 40 per cent of our global revenues and we are making significant investments in building domain and technology capabilities to differentiate us from our competition and to continue growing in this sector. We are also focusing heavily on ensuring we have constant flow of talented associates to support the demand in this segment.

Contract renewals help in exploring opportunities for further optimisation and enhanced business value.

What’s different about catering to regions like Africa?

Regions like Africa require us to make investment locally in the region to support frameworks such as B-BBEE in South Africa. There are also unique regulatory requirements in the region that need to be catered to in our solutions. There is a significant talent pool available in such regions which we are capitalising on to create unique and differentiated solutions for our clients.

Anything about the JV for IT Services in MENA region that you can share here?

The JV for IT Services in MENA is in incubation stage and we will share more details about this in due course.

By Pratima H

Srinivas Rao

Executive Vice President & Chief Business Officer,

LTIMindtree

pratimah@cybermedia.co.in