Over the last few years, the global benefits market has continued to evolve as vendors have launched offerings to address the needs of multinationals. Essentially, there have been two main approaches: Providing global brokerage and consulting services Providing a global technology offering with optional local administration services. The global brokerage and consulting model has been [...]

In December 2015, we published two blogs about M&A activity in the IT services industry in 2015 (here are the links for Part 1 and Part 2). This blog examines M&A activity in IT services in Q1 2016 and sets our expectations for the rest of this year. In short, 2016 started off with a bang, with two very large IT services acquisitions announced in the first [...]

In the retail banking BPS market assessment I am currently undertaking, several key trends are emerging regarding which processes are being outsourced and why. Banks do not outsource all processes at once, and selecting the highest priority processes to outsource can be reduced to an analysis of two key dimensions: Margin: where profit margins are highest, usually with new processes or produ[...]

Self-service has long been part of the customer service mix, dating back to user manuals, and progressing to the first IVRs, website FAQs, and experience sharing communities such as Amazon Help. Even though self-service support has a wide range of benefits and savings for consumers and businesses, its adoption has been slow – due partly to technological limitations, and to a tendency to use [...]

At its Meeting of the Minds (MOTM) conference last week, ADP explained its focus on full provision of services, technology, and continuous innovation, and presented recent examples, including delivery of ~10m 1095 forms in the U.S. as part of ACA, deployment of a new ‘user experience’, and the launch of ADP Onboarding. Long-established as a provider of global payroll services, ADP also[...]

Financial institutions are seeking to deepen their operational capital in order to drive down cost of operations, increasing fixed cost and reducing variable cost (non-linear cost reduction). Here we look at two examples of how institutions are achieving this by partnering with third party operations vendors. Capital Markets Client with Broadridge In this example, Broadridge is providing a p[...]

The utilities sector is an important one for HCL. The company has worked with ~100 utilities and currently has 25 active utilities clients, with its utilities revenue primarily from the U.S., U.K., and Australia. To focus further on this sector, HCL has enhanced its capability to offer end-to-end and BPaaS-based services through a number of partnerships and is now going to market targeting[...]

Sopra Steria announced recently its 2015 results (click here for more information on the recent results). The results contained a number of surprises. Our key take-aways from the results are discussed below. Strong Financial Performance in French Operations in Spite of Merger Credit is due to Sopra Steria’s management in managing the rapid turnaround of Steria France in spite of i[...]

When you imagine how manufacturing companies might be making use of the Internet of Things (IoT), chances are the first image that comes to mind is of factory robots. These and SCADA systems have been providing remote monitoring and management systems for many years, well before the term IoT was coined. And, as you’d expect, manufacturers are integrating IoT-based solutions into their M2M sy[...]

It’s no secret that employee engagement levels remain low. Gallup found that the number of employees engaged in the U.S. remained at around 32% in 2015 (13% worldwide). Furthermore, over the last five years, employee engagement levels have remained relatively consistent, floating between 29% and 32%. While there are many reasons why employees are disengaged, organizations need to be proac[...]

TCS recently introduced 360 Degree Assurance (360), an AI-based IP, based on analyzing data gathered from several sources across the IT software development life-cycle. Current use cases cover defect root cause analysis and for test case optimization. 360 follows the introduction last year by TCS Assurance Services Unit (ASU) of NETRA, proprietary IP which helps automate the Dev-to-Ops cycle. N[...]

This is the first in a series of blogs looking at various aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT) market. Here I take a look at the use of IoT in the connected vehicle space, and at the shape of market potential. IoT can be used to build connected vehicle systems to enable: Vehicle-to-vehicle communication so that vehicles can update each other on road conditions, allow vehicles to proper[...]

IBM Quality Assurance and Testing Services (QA&TS) practice recently briefed NelsonHall on its approach to managing test cases and on reducing the numbers of test case automation, beyond pair-wise testing. Before we jump into the details of IBM QA&TS’ offering, let’s step back for a few moments: software testing remains a very human labor-intensive activity. If we take a man[...]

At the end of 2015, private equity group Blackstone closed the purchase of Serco’s private sector BPO business for £250m (~$375m), and the company has now rebranded to its original name, Intelenet Global Services. Today, Intelenet employs ~55k staff across 66 delivery centers in eight countries, providing Customer Management Services (CMS), F&A, Knowledge Management, and ITO servic[...]

For over a decade, freemium has been the ubiquitous business model for fledgling internet firms and the developers of smartphone apps. Users sign up for free to enable basic features, and are then drawn into subscribing to various levels of premium functionality. More recently, the freemium model has been the subject of considerable attention in the B2B market research space, with some rather extr[...]

NelsonHall research shows that the top vendor selection criteria for buyers of RPO services include having a geographic footprint aligned with client geographies, and the ability to scale geographically to meet future needs. Over the last few years U.K.-based vendors in particular have been expanding their RPO and related recruiting and talent offerings globally, via M&As, partnerships and/or [...]

Last week, Cognizant released results for Q4 and full year 2015. At first glance, results looked strong. Q4 revenues were $3,232.5m, up 17.9% y/y, up 16% in CC, and adjusted operating margin was 19.6%, up 18 bps y/y and in the middle of the company's target range of 19%-20%. If we look at Q4 2015 revenue performance in Cognizant’s two largest vertical groups: Financial Services,[...]

Wipro announced yesterday it is to acquire Tampa-based HealthPlan Services (HPS) from Water Street Healthcare Partners for $460m, including a $20m deferred consideration. HPS' 2015 revenues were $223m. It has achieved a CAAGR of 38% in the last three years, driven both from adding new healthcare payers and from the increase in individuals or groups eligible for[...]

Much has been written about FinTech in banking. However, the focus has been on functionality enablement and consumer experience, with little insight into what the limits of FinTech benefits might be (and how that would shape an implementation strategy) or how banks can enable a roadmap that drives process improvement. Here I address both of these questions. What are the reasonable goals of FinT[...]

The cloud-based HR services offering contains many of the same services that traditional HR BPO/multi-process HRO (MPHRO) suppliers have provided, plus a few new components. Services can be divided into the three broad categories of pre-deployment, deployment, and post-deployment services: Pre-deployment services include HR cloud consulting, focusing largely on HR SaaS technology selection a[...]