IBM and Infosys have won a major deal from UK-based bank Williams & Glyn’s, which is a part of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group.
The deal, which is valued at Rs 2,535 crore, is for building a new technology system for Williams & Glyn’s, a bank that has been defunct for 30 years but has seen fund infusions to the tune of £800 million from a group led by private equity firm Corsair Capital and a consortium of investors.
The new bank will have 314 branches with a customer based of 1.7 million customers, located mostly in north-west England and is scheduled to start operations in the London market in late 2015, according to reports.
Core banking
While the details of the nature of work are not public, Infosys will be developing some aspects of core banking systems for Williams & Glyn’s, which would include mobile banking applications, that will help bank customers do transactions on the mobile phone, said a source in Infosys, who was involved in this process and could not be named due to protocol reasons. When contacted, an Infosys spokesperson said: “We do not comment on client engagements.”
On its part, IBM will extend its work on electronic bank account management service, which it had piloted with RBS in 2011. This work involves setting up and creating account openings using an XML standard (an encoded digital format that can be read by both humans and machines) before sending them to RBS via the electronic bank account management portal.
Industry watchers feel that this marquee deal has come at a time when Infosys is undergoing a lot of changes since its iconic co-founder N. R. Narayana Murthy has taken charge at the helm of the company.
‘More to come’
However, analysts feel that more such deals need to be won in order to get growth momentum back.
“The company has been clearly struggling to bag marquee deals which it has been losing out to competitors and more such deals need to be won to bring growth back,” said A.K. Prabhakar, IT analyst who formerly the Vice-President of Equity Research with Anand Rathi, a Mumbai-based brokerage firm.
venkatesh.ganesh@thehindu.co.in