Wipro, Punjab & Sind Bank Sign 10-Year IT Outsourcing Contract

Wipro yesterday announced that it has signed a 10-year IT outsourcing services contract with Punjab & Sind Bank (PSB). The contract was signed in Delhi and will enable centralised banking operations for PSB branches spread across the country.

Under this contract, Wipro will be responsible for System Integration, provisioning and management of Finacle core banking solution and enterprise applications. This would include 24*7 management of the entire underlying IT infrastructure covering computing platforms and networking. As part of the program, Wipro will also undertake commissioning and management of the Data Centre and the Disaster Recovery centre, and Service and Support for the Bank. The solution is expected to completely transform the bank’s IT landscape in terms of improved agility for offering innovative banking services.

In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Anand Sankaran, Senior VP and Head, India & Middle East Business of Wipro said the contract value is upwards of Rs 100 crore.

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Below are excerpts of the same:

Is this a core banking solution or have you got a contract to maintain systems?

It is a total outsourcing contract for core banking operations of the bank. Besides the core banking operations, we would also be implementing a whole lot of other applications—12 different applications. We would be also responsible for the underlying computing storage and network infrastructure, including commissioning and management of the entire data centre and the data recovery system.
This is a 10-year contract. The first phase will comprise implementation and roll-out of the core banking application. We expect to roll out the pilot branches in the first six months and expect to complete the entire roll-out of 500 branches in the next couple of years.

How much money is this contract worth?

This is a 10-year contract and it has a value upwards of Rs 100 crore.

Generally, are you expecting that the Indian banking space is likely to yield more order now than it has done in the past? Would you agree that it appears to have come out of the turmoil compared to BFSI verticals elsewhere?

We are out of the slowdown, if you will, which we saw in Q4 of 2008 going into the second quarter of the last calendar year. We saw recovery happening from the third quarter of last year and since then we have seen not only banking but also other financial segments in India as well as globally sprucing up their consumption of technology. ( www.moneycontrol.com)