While credit conditions continue to be tight in the US and European markets, banks are utilising the excess cash to upgrade their IT systems and spruce up their back-offices. This is turning out to the advantage of Finacle, the specialised core banking platform from Infosys Technologies. Finacle has been witnessing greater leverage in markets beyond its traditional strongholds in the past year. The platform, developed entirely out of India, saw its market share in Australia, Europe and the Americas grow over 8 per cent in 2008-09 from 32 per cent a year earlier.
“Going forward, we see these three regions further increasing their share of Finacle implementations over the traditional markets. We have raised a few large deals in the Americas region in the last 3-6 months,” said Sanat Rao, vice-president and head — worldwide sales, Finacle. A substantial part of Infosys’ revenues in India currently comes in from Finacle.
Rao said that Finacle has bagged a project from UK-based consumer cooperative bank, Co-operative Financial Services (CFS), which is replacing its multiple existing platforms with the Finacle Universal Banking Solution. The project will stretch into 2012.
“Infosys has 70 employees in Manchester working on the CFS project. We also have a larger team supporting them on the back-end,” Rao said.
CFS is learnt to have set aside a corpus of 250 million pounds over the next three years to upgrade its entire IT infrastructure as its existing technology infrastructure is considered unsuitable for future requirements.
CFS will replace systems across its back-office and channels in the retail banking and corporate banking businesses with Finacle. This project will include implementation of Finacle core banking, CRM (uniting banking and insurance businesses) and e-banking solutions across the critical home-market operations of CFS in the UK.
“CFS had rated us as a preferred vendor last year and we signed the contract with them in January this year. We expect Release 1 pertaining to work on the front-end of the bank’s systems which are Web-based to be ready by end-2009. The back-end functions, primarily housed on legacy systems, will be migrated by early 2012,” Rao said.
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“We are extending Finacle to cover all functions of the bank with the exception of the treasury systems.”
In calendar 2009 so far, Infosys has won 16 new customers for Finacle, totalling up to 116 customers in 62 countries. Finacle added two top banks, one each from North America and Western Europe, to its list of customers in the quarter ended March 31. It won six new customers in the Asia Pacific region, one each in the Europe, Middle East and Australia (EMEA) region and the Americas. The Emirates NBD (National Bank of Dubai) is in the process of upgrading its CRM systems.
A Regional Rural Bank (RRB) sponsored by the Union Bank of India, and another sponsored by Punjab National Bank have implemented Finacle at their branches. South Indian Bank is another key customer.
Infosys saw its share of revenues from banking and financial services decline to 25.7 per cent in fiscal 2009 from 26.9 per cent a year earlier. Share of Finacle sales, however, increased to 4 per cent in 2009 from 3.7 per cent in 2008.
These include seven large transformational wins across the globe through the year. New clients in the EMEA region are CFS, UK, Raiffeisen International, BBVA, Spain and DSB of the Netherlands.
Besides, a large full-service bank and another large financial services provider in the US, and a fast growing bank in New Zealand have engaged with Infosys to carry out Finacle-based transformational deals.