The lending business is highly cyclical due to its sensitivity to interest rates, economic cycles, and capital availability to fund loans. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, these factors are currently driving down mortgage originations, which have fallen 60% y/y in the U.S. in Q4 2022. The decline in originations pressuring the margins of this high-cost activity is th[...]

  Analytics has often been run as a series of periodic and siloed exercises. However, to respond to their customers in the smartest, fastest, most efficient manner, WNS perceives that organizations increasingly need to run their analytics always-on, in almost real-time, and on an enterprise rather than siloed basis. To do this and become ‘insights-led enterprises’, organiza[...]

  Digital startup banks are built on FinTech functionality to deliver financial services in an omnichannel environment. There are two types of FinTechs: B2B businesses that have a proprietary platform to deliver service to clients, and B2C businesses that provide clients with an all-digital banking experience. WNS: expanded focus on B2C FinTechs While WNS supports B2B and B2C, it[...]

  WNS has a highly developed property & casualty (P&C) insurance practice handling 30 million claims transactions and ~$12 billion in claims spend annually. The company has extensive capability in property & casualty supporting motor, property, casualty, employer and public liability for insurers, fleet operators, MGAs, global corporates, and municipal authorities. WNS has [...]

  In a year when the U.S. stock market pushed to a record high, the U.K. had its worst recession in 300 years, and entire sectors shut down for weeks, business planning has become less reliable while demand fluctuates unexpectedly and inconsistently. The supporting industry of CX services is directly impacted on two fronts: Challenges with supply, where the traditional multi-hund[...]

  The pandemic has changed organizations’ attitudes towards the need for change, greatly increasing their emphasis on adopting new digital process models and digital transformation. Partly this is driven by the need to enhance their transactional efficiency and effectiveness rapidly, but at least equally importantly, it has brought a much greater requirement for real-time informa[...]

  Convex Group is a start-up specialty insurer and reinsurer focused on complex risks, launched with $1.8bn of committed capital in April 2019. Convex will underwrite insurance and reinsurance for “complex specialty risks across a diversified range of business lines” in London and Bermuda. The company aims to adopt a conservative investment strategy with a predominantly hig[...]

  Dozens of influencers recently attended the WNS U.S. Influencer Day in New Orleans, where the theme was 'Co-create to Outperform’. Through general overviews of its approaches and through client presentations, the company provided insight into its recent success and its future plans. The backdrop for the conference was cheery, buoyed by 7% annualized growth over the prior fi[...]

  I recently attended the WNS influencer conference in New Orleans, the theme of which was 'Co-create to Outperform’. WNS believes that the marketplace understands what transformation means for their businesses, but the challenge is how to achieve this vision. WNS’ view is that, for transformation to be effective, it needs to be customized for the client with their full[...]

  NelsonHall recently visited WNS’ Analytics CoE in Bangalore. Research & analytics (R&A) services are key activities for WNS, as a first point of entry into new clients, and also as a higher margin activity in existing accounts. Readers of NelsonHall’s Quarterly Updates on WNS will be aware that WNS is looking to increase the level of annuity revenues from analytic[...]

For years, the application of analytics in HR services has been heavily focused on descriptive information such as workforce demographics (e.g. average employee age, proportion of males to females, number of employees are nearing retirement, etc.) or talent management metrics (e.g. average time to hire, cost per hire, number of training hours per employee, etc.). In fact, ~90% of analytic[...]

  NelsonHall recently attended WNS analyst/adviser events in New York and the U.K., where the theme was “NEXT”, with the sub-text of assisting organizations in “thriving in a state of constant disruption”. While the trend to digitalization of business processes using technologies such as robotics and cloud, artificial intelligence, and big data is causing con[...]

  Initiatives around incorporating intelligent technologies to automate and create efficiencies across different HR processes is a top priority for many vendors. To date, RPA has made the most headway, e.g. in payroll for forms management, in benefits for pension calculations, in recruiting for scheduling a candidate’s interview or resume scanning, and in learning for proces[...]

  While Facebook banks on the smartphone camera to digitalize offline relationships, and sales people use Snapchat to sell real estate, the main challenges for marketers to reach this level of interaction are structural – how to visualize huge amounts of disparate data to get actionable insights fast at a granular level. Here I take a look at how one CMS vendor, WNS, is tackling [...]

  NelsonHall attended the WNS analyst conference in New York last week for a business update and to hear about their current initiatives. Here I take a quick look at WNS’ banking industry business specifically, and at how it is focused on applying FinTech to BPS delivery to support large productivity gains for its U.S. regional banking clients. Market conditions are driving c[...]

On March 15, WNS announced its intended acquisition of HealthHelp, in what, at $95m, will be its largest acquisition to date. HealthHelp, founded in 1999 and headquartered in Houston, TX is a 400-FTE strong healthcare utilization management specialist. In many ways, the HealthHelp acquisition has much in common with WNS’ Value Edge acquisition. HealthHelp, like Value Edge, will become[...]

WNS has just closed its acquisition of Denali Sourcing Services.  An investment of around $40m, funded primarily with long-term debt, this is WNS’ largest acquisition in a decade (since that of Marketics Technologies, which enhanced its ability to offer offshore analytics services in 2007). And it is paying over 2x revenues for Denali Sourcing Services. So this is more than a tuck-i[...]

  Last week, NelsonHall attended the latest BPM Summit in Cape Town organized by BPeSA (Business Process enabling South Africa), the official trade body for the outsourcing and contact center industry in the Western Cape. The event provides an opportunity for potential investors, analysts, providers, and government officials to interact. Here I take a look at the appeal of South Africa[...]

Over the last few months, I have held discussions with a number of leading customer management services (CMS) vendors and their clients regarding the increasing need for advanced analytics to drive step changes in customer experience (CX). Here, I reflect on the changing role of analytics as they take centre stage as the key to disruptive CX. How times have changed When I first participa[...]

This is the second in a series of blogs looking at how business process outsourcing vendors are applying RPA and AI in the insurance sector.   WNS’ RPA journey is moving quickly, with six pilots underway and five more ready to go. WNS has decided to wait on AI for the time being, in favour of developing its process automation capabilities, which has included the launch of eAdj[...]