Vendor Analysis
published on Feb 11, 2015
Report Overview:
This NelsonHall assessment analyzes Cognizant's offerings and capabilities in capital markets BPO. Cognizant is one of a number of reference data management BPO companies analyzed in NelsonHall's comprehensive industry analysis programs.
Who is this Report for:
NelsonHall's Mortgage and Loan (M&L) BPO vendor assessment for Cognizant is a comprehensive assessment of Cognizant's M&L BPO offerings and capabilities designed for:
- Sourcing managers monitoring the capabilities of existing suppliers of capital market process outsourcing and identifying vendor suitability for M&L BPO RFPs
- Vendor marketing, sales and business managers looking to benchmark themselves against their peers
- Financial analysts and investors specializing in the support services sector.
Scope of this Report:
The report provides a comprehensive and objective analysis of Cognizant's M&L BPO offerings, capabilities, and market and financial strength, including:
- Identification of the company's strategy, emphases and new developments
- Analysis of the company's strengths, weaknesses and outlook
- Revenue estimates
- Analysis of the profile of the company's customer base including the company's targeting strategy and examples of current contracts
- Analysis of the company's offerings and key service components
- Analysis of the company's delivery organization including the location of delivery locations.
Key Findings & Highlights:
Cognizant's M&L BPO services are delivered out of its BPO unit, which was founded in 2004. Cognizant entered the BPO market as part of its Horizon 2 initiative, which is a program to grow revenues and business faster than the overall industry, by focusing on emerging challenges and new technologies in its key focus industries.
Cognizant's focus processes for BPO are industry specific processes impacting the cost of goods sold; for retail banking that means industry specific functions, especially loan origination and tax payments.
Cognizant entered the M&L BPO line of business in 2004. It did not want to offer what it viewed as commoditized BPO services, so it decided to focus on industry specific BPO services. Cognizant's first move into M&L BPO was in bank lending processes, and its first win was processing student loans for a bank. From student loan processing, Cognizant expanded into mortgage loan processing. Initially it was providing single processes for mortgage lenders; over time this has expanded into multiple processes, for both lenders and master servicers.
Cognizant M&L BPO delivers service from seven delivery centers:
- India:
- Hyderabad
- Bangalore
- Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata
- Manila
- Onshore (U.S.):
- Des Moines
- Phoenix
- Florida.
Each physical center has a backup location to assure backup and disaster recovery. Client operations are deployed within centers, with client specific security.
Cognizant's primary targets are:
- Tier 1 mortgage servicers headquartered in the U.S. and U.K.
- Large U.S. regional banks
- Existing clients of Cognizant's IT services.
Key target process lines for Cognizant, in order of priority, are:
- Mortgage administration
- Default management
- Loan origination
- Real estate recovery services.
Cognizant's M&L BPO clients include:
- U.S. residential mortgage servicers
- U.K. and Australia residential mortgage servicer
- U.S. regional banks.
Cognizant has focused its M&L BPO offerings on a few specific processes heavily centered on collateral support. It acquired much of its collateral support services with the acquisition of Corelogic India.
Cognizant has a strong IT services legacy. It intends to support those clients and prospects in their stated intention to modernize their mortgage platforms over the next three years; Cognizant will develop BPO offerings that facilitate platform modernization, typically by replacing internal IT with BPaaS services (platform based BPO).