Indian BFSI CIOs Expect Vendors To Offer Fresh Approach: Springboard

The Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) IT Services market in India is expected to grow from $1.6 billion in 2009 to $2.7 billion in 2013, growing at a CAGR of 14.2 percent, says Springboard Research. Springboard’s latest report, ‘The Indian IT Services Market for the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance Vertical’ notes that this intensely competitive market remains fragmented among a large number of service providers.

“Although the BFSI vertical in India is maturing in terms of adoption and usage of IT, it continues to be price sensitive. ‘Hard to please’ Indian CIOs are becoming as demanding as their global counterparts, consistently expecting vendors to offer a ‘fresh approach’,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, Senior Research Analyst for Services at Springboard Research. “Now, the key challenge for IT vendors moving forward will be to keep pace with end user demand for rapid innovation,” said Gogia.

CRM and BI are ‘Core’ to IT Investment

Springboard observed that there is a ‘great rush’ to step-up customer service levels and companies in the BFSI space have been rapidly investing in IT to work towards fulfillment of this objective. With increasing competitive pressure, it is getting harder for BFSI enterprises to ‘win and keep’ customers. The move to adopt CRM solutions and customer-focused technology is driven by the increasing need for maintaining and enhancing customer relationships.

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Business Intelligence (BI) is yet another key priority for BFSI enterprises, which helps to identify and capture potential customers. Organisations in India are also using high-end analytics to indentify fraud and money laundering. Given the critical nature of the solution, Springboard believes BI and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) solutions will have significant growth in the Indian BFSI marketplace in the next two to three years.

Cost Benefit is Key Driver for ‘Green IT’ Investments

Indian BFSI enterprises are benefitting from the ‘green’ consolidation of storage, servers, and data centre-based applications. However, the primary reason of adoption continues to be ‘cost-benefit’ and not the ‘social cause’ attached to it. Also, CIOs no longer feel insecure with the hosting approach and realise the cost-related benefits of dedicated hosting over a resource sharing approach.

Springboard suggests that vendors define achievable unique selling propositions for the overall ecosystem. “The Indian IT Services market for BFSI (and overall) is highly competitive with limited top level differentiation. Vendors must now adopt a BFSI-specific template, ‘productise’ their service offerings to try to maximise the potential for lower price points delivering improved and sustainable margins,” advised Phil Hassey, Vice President for Services at Springboard Research.