Tata Spins Off Financial Software Unit

Having witnessed a surge in demand for its financial software offerings - from 150 financial services customers in fiscal year 2006 to 214 financial customers in FY 2007 - Tata Consultancy Services tomorrow will set its financial software group loose as a new entity called TCS Financial Solutions.

The group will be headed by N. Ganapathy Subramaniam and have 2,560 employees, 1,800 of them developers. The existing product suite, called BANCS, includes software for CRM, core banking, global custody, corporate actions, lending and borrowing, payments, insurance, private banking, wealth and online trading. TCS Financial will sell these applications under three different models: as licensed products, as a complete yet customizable platform, or as hosted services.Some of the demand for Tata's software in the financial industry is coming from outsourcing customers who, having shucked off much internal software development to an offshore firm, later realized that they sacrificed having the right in-house talent to maintain that software and change it as new needs arise, such as MiFID compliance.

"In the minds of customers, the behavior of a product company is completely different from the services business," says Subramaniam, president of TCS Financial. "A services organization is not expected to maintain or enhance the application; the customer has to take responsibility. A product company, on the other hand, is expected to maintain the product and understand the impact of new regulations, standards, and other events that call for software design changes." Hence the new product company.

TCS Financial Solutions will roll out its first round of new products at the CIBOS show in Boston in October.