Wipro acquired Capco six months ago, and is Wipro’s largest ever acquisition which, if successful, should enable it to compete with tier-one technology and management consulting firms in large-scale, domain critical, transformation projects with financial institutions.

However, successful unions are not created at the strategic level, but with disciplined execution that drives client and employee retention and growth. This blog examines early activities and results from this union.

Background

In Q1 2021, Wipro acquired Capco for $1.45 Bn to extend its capabilities in technology and management consulting for the banking and financial services industry. Wipro already had a large presence in BFSI, which currently represents 36% of its revenues, with offerings centered on designing, building, integrating, implementing, and supporting services. Capco’s services are centered on business and technology consulting and digital transformation services customized for the financial services industry.

Capco’s geographic footprint differs from Wipro’s, with key accounts in Europe and North America. In addition, Capco has a network of onshore and nearshore shared consulting capability centers in Europe and North America which support Wipro moving closer to the client.

Complementary business models

The partners have complementary business models. Capco is a global consultancy focused on financial services, with 96% of its revenues from Europe and North America and a smaller presence in APAC. When comparing Capco’s top 30 strategic accounts with Wipro’s Top 45 strategic accounts, only five of the accounts overlap. One year before this union, Capco formally launched its insurance practice, which today is accelerating its growth based on its frameworks and accelerators and the ability to bring Wipro resources to bear.  

Wipro has a broader geographic presence (including a strong presence in APAC, LATAM, and the Middle East), greater scale, and unique domain offerings (U.S.-based mortgage lending IP and delivery, and Canadian custody services). Together the two firms bring an end-to-end set of services offerings to the market, comparable in scope to the largest IT and consulting services vendors. 

The combined Wipro/Capco consultancy is bringing five digital service propositions to market focused on:

• Data
• Cybersecurity
• Customer experience transformation
• Cloud transformation
• Digitization.

The go-to-market strategy is for Wipro and Capco to maintain and manage their individual client relationships and collaborate to identify specific opportunities, through joint planning, to cross-sell services.

During the past six months, the combined entity has booked 20 new joint deals as a result of their new GTM strategy and there are currently more than 65 deals in their joint pipeline. The combined firm is looking for, and so far winning, larger, more comprehensive deals than either had before this union. Key examples of new deals won include:

• Setting up a new digital-only bank: two deals, one in North America and one in Europe
• Customer onboarding application rationalization for a provider of financial products to banks
• Migrating a treasury product application suite to the cloud 
• Custody engagements in Canada: multiple deal wins engaging both Wipro and Capco offerings.

To power the new strategy, Capco needs to retain its staff and Wipro needs to grow its delivery capabilities in relevant technology areas. Key activities to date include:

• Capco has always attracted staff through a strong employee value proposition, supported by a differentiating culture and by offering highly competitive compensation coupled with strict non-competes. These contracts have built a stable, growing workforce
• Capco has added >1k employees to its existing 5k employee base over the last six months
• Wipro has integrated project delivery into its existing global delivery network. 

Go-to-market plans for next 12 months  

Over the next twelve months, Wipro and Capco will develop joint account plans for their joint strategic accounts. The primary focus will be on deepening strategic account engagements, with a secondary focus on winning new account logos with engagements that draw on the combined offerings of both Capco and Wipro. Wipro’s strategy has been to focus on strong growth from strategic accounts paired with a healthy addition of new clients each year.  

Capco has hired four senior leaders to help drive an expansion of its offerings into the APAC marketplace, which will leverage Wipro’s existing infrastructure and account relationships.  

Conclusions

The partners’ highly complementary offerings are being synthesized into five digital service propositions for the marketplace. Rigorous account management with clearly defined roles is driving larger, more comprehensive engagements with existing and new clients. Wipro will be able to enhance engagements with existing clients. It is now beginning to compete with vendors on projects requiring end-to-end services. Success over the long term will require continued operational discipline, evolving offerings to include a greater custom domain component, and retention of key skillsets. The union is off to a good start.