Last week, I attended Cielo’s annual analyst event, held at its service center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Here I round up the latest high-level developments at the RPO vendor, then take a closer look at its Latin American business. Latest developments & 2020 roadmap Cielo performs ~157k hires for ~154 clients in ~92 countries in 36 languages. Clients are served by ~2[...]

  Wipro has a long history of building operations platforms in support of shared services and has been evolving its Base))) platform for 10 years. The platform started life as a business process management (i.e. workflow) platform and includes Base))) Core, a BPM platform in use within ~25 Wipro operations floors, and Base))) Prism, providing operational metrics. These elements of B[...]

Bertelsmann, the parent company of Arvato CRM Solutions, has announced plans to combine Arvato CRM with the CX services business of the Pan-African Saham Group. The joint venture will have 50/50 ownership, with ~ €1.2bn combined annual revenues and ~48k employees in 25 countries. The deal is expected to close in January 2019. Saham Group & partnership history Founded in 1995 in [...]

  The healthcare revenue cycle management (RCM) outsourcing services market in the U.S. seems ripe for disruption and consolidation. The macro factors include: Contraction in the number of hospital locations and hospital systems Speedy erosion in the number of small, independent physicians’ practices Increasing complexity in reimbursement models and processes Increasi[...]

  This past week, I attended two HR events at opposite ends of the Las Vegas strip: HR Technology conference and SuccessFactors’ SuccessConnect client event. Together, they attracted ~14k HR leaders, practitioners, vendors, analysts, thought leaders, and clients, and had the common theme and purpose of showcasing the latest HR technologies and innovations that are enabling employ[...]

This is the latest in a recent series of blogs on open banking, which is likely to become the biggest driver of change in the banking industry since double-entry bookkeeping swept the industry in Genoa during the 1300s. I recently talked with Virtusa’s xLabs, a digital innovation hub within Virtusa, about their approach to open banking and what their roadmap is for the future. Open In[...]

  I recently attended the TCS Business 4.0 conference in Boston to understand TCS’ latest developments in the BFSI sector. Here are the key takeaways. BFSI represented 32.5% of TCS’ Q2 2018 revenues and generated $7.7bn in revenue over the latest twelve months. TCS reports 20% of BFSI revenues are derived from its digital offerings, with BFSI clients adopting digital tec[...]

  We recently talked with Performance Engineering, a horizontal unit within Tech Mahindra and a growth story within the firm’s testing practice: the unit’s headcount has nearly tripled in the last four years to 1.2k. Part of this success relates to changes that Tech Mahindra has made to its service portfolio, which has expanded from a specialized testing offering (perfor[...]

  While Sopra Steria may be known for its execution excellence and its investment in delivery industrialization, it had not really invested in creating accelerators and IP. Then, early last year it launched its Digital Enablers program with accelerators in mind. The company followed a slightly different approach to some of its peers in India, and initially focused on providing its d[...]

  NelsonHall recently caught up with managed cloud and hosting vendor Rackspace. We discussed Rackspace’s May 2018 acquisition of a Salesforce consulting and systems integration partner, RelationEdge, and how the acquisition fits into its plans. Who is RelationEdge? RelationEdge (RE) was founded in 2013, in San Diego, CA. The company is positioned as a business process reen[...]

  Capgemini has launched a new offering in its digital HR portfolio, Digital Learning Operations (DLO). A key feature of DLO is platform flexibility, important because next-gen platforms are better at delivering just-in-time training personalized for the learner. DLO is also important because its Digital Content Factory focuses on providing content via digital modalities, which ar[...]

  In February, industry veteran and CEO of SYKES, Chuck Sykes, commented during the earnings call on CX services market trends: ‘… in the U.S., at least in my time, there is no time in the company's history that I can recall seeing this level of labor challenge. And it actually is something that you're going to see in a lot of developed countries around the world.&[...]

  With the rise of every new technology, there is a parallel rush among enterprises to incorporate it into the near-term IT roadmap, and for good reason: new technologies offer cost savings, CX improvement, better risk management, and a host of other benefits that look terrific in annual reports and quarterly earnings documentation. Nowhere is that trend more prevalent than in block[...]

  Since the financial crisis, regulators have been tightening the KYC processes banks are required to undertake. Enhanced KYC requirements have been applied across many regulations, including MiFID, PSD2, and ultimate beneficial ownership requirements (U.S. CDD Rule). And, as compliance requirements have increased, banks have spent increasing amounts of time and resources on addressing[...]

  As part of NelsonHall’s recent Next Generation Payroll Services market analysis, in addition to interviewing 20 of the leading payroll services providers globally, our research extended to a survey of the vendors’ clients. We met clients of different sizes, from a variety of geographies and industries, and covering a range of services in-scope and levels of payroll sourci[...]

  NelsonHall recently attended Mphasis’ analyst summit in Foxboro, Massachusetts. Key takeaways are that the company is now focusing on digital and cognitive services applied to legacy systems, and on geographic expansion, specifically in North America and continental Europe. Mphasis is leveraging its industry experience, including BFSI, which accounts for ~75% of revenues, to[...]

  SCM is one of Genpact’s “invest-to-grow” service lines, where the company is looking to make disproportionate investments and scale up the business: in this case, to become one of the top two global supply chain transformation services vendors. In its “invest-to-grow” businesses, Genpact is looking to achieve at least twice the level of revenue growth ac[...]

  NelsonHall’s recently published global BPS market forecast reveals that the overall HR services market will grow at 5.8% in 2018. Here I look at how each of the key HRS sub-service lines have performed in H1 2018. In order of number of contracts announced (highest to lowest), this covers Benefits Administration, Multi-Process HRS, Learning, Payroll, and Recruitment. I also prov[...]

  Currently, the level of automation in the front-office is lower than it is for middle and back-office processes, with reasons including the lower cost of handling customer-facing processes, established offshore models for labor arbitrage, and lack of client interest. However, the upside of this relatively slow uptake is that automation can now be applied to multiple areas of CX, incl[...]

This week started with the announcement by Atos of its intended acquisition of Syntel for $41 a share, a total consideration of around $3.57bn including Syntel’s net debt of $201m, in an all-cash deal. Syntel being acquired is not a total surprise: the company has faced some challenges recently, and in the previous four weeks its share price had been going up strongly (from $31.61 a s[...]