At the 2019 Infosys Confluence North American event last week, we spoke with execs about how Infosys has been driving accelerated growth in the BFSI sector in North America. Most of Infosys’ revenues in BFSI are in Banking and Financial (BFS) services, where the recent growth been based on the following major activities:

• Installations of Finacle: in the past two years, Finacle, which now has 540 installations globally, has seen increasing adoption in North America. Key to this has been a focus on modules that solve immediate client problems, and then radiating to additional modules as required. Key high demand modules in the North American marketplace for Finacle include:
  • Digital engagement suite
  • Payments platform (electronic payments)
  • Commercial banking
  • Setting up a new digital bank (Finacle has regulatory approval in 50 states, something only a few legacy ISVs have)
• Reengineering sales engagements: Infosys has restructured its GTM from an offering siloed approach to a client management team approach. This change in approach has helped deliver improved topline growth in North America, from 4.5% (as reported) in FY18 to 8.1% in FY19, outstripping both Accenture and TCS
• Design-led transformation engagements: e.g. creating the branch of the future for a regional bank.

Current areas of focus in BFS segments include:

• Mortgages: this is the largest single LOB revenue generator in the retail banking industry. In Europe, Infosys has recently formed a JV with ABN AMRO’s mortgage operations in the Netherlands, taking a majority stake (see our note here). And in the U.S., Infosys has acquired the entire IT team of a regional Charlotte, NC lender. It has also recently hired an industry veteran to rationalize its North American mortgage go-to-market activities and grow the business. The ability to scale operations up and down in the notoriously volatile lending industry is a key reason some lenders are adopting Infosys’ cloud-delivered mortgage services. Using its regional centers, it expects to grow its local lender business to 20% of its overall U.S. mortgage revenues  
• Wealth and Asset Management: W&A managers need to launch new fee-based products to market rapidly to grow their business. The Infosys services team has been able to support new product development based on its work with market infrastructure providers. The Finacle platform allows new modules to be set up quickly (often in a quarter of the time an internal set-up would take). The reduced time to market provides significant sales acceleration to the client. Revenues from this type of engagement, and the pipeline, have grown rapidly over the past two years.

Banking clients we spoke to said that they anticipate continuing to move to the cloud (the reduction in time-to-market making the cloud value proposition compelling even when the cost is higher) and remain committed to moving to a hybrid cloud environment. They anticipate that the next big technology disruption in their sector will be the adoption of ML, which will accelerate over the next 24 months and start to deliver robust value.   

Infosys’ banking sector business has regrouped its GTM, with a clear focus on providing agility to banks so they can reduce their time-to-market with new product introductions. Infosys claims typical cost reductions of 40-50% and reduced time to market. Their increased sales growth indicates it is working well.

At the same time, Infosys has continued to invest with technology and operations acquisitions and will continue to increase its footprint in Western Europe and the U.S. One challenge will be handling volume swings when the market turns.    

A major focus at Infosys’ client event was its Live Enterprise (LE) approach - we will shortly be publishing a separate blog on this.