‘Our business is only B2B, maybe we’ll get into B2C’

With a stellar year in terms of growth, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT services firm, has set its eyes on its next milestone — being a $50-billion company. Chief Operating Officer spoke with Shivani Shinde about the company’s wish li

Your annual report states that reaching the $50-billion goal sooner rather than later is achievable. Beyond the numbers, where do you see TCS in the next five years?

TCS has over 600,000 people and we are $25 billion now, but I don’t want to be 1.2 billion people when we reach $50 billion. The first wish is to achieve the $50-billion milestone with fewer people, so there is an element of nonlinearity as well. Second, we not only work with customers, but play in their ecosystem. So, what happens at one client is relevant for other customers, too. This also allows us to create systems that give real-time information. Future solutions are going to be such. Third, at present Metaverse is a hype cycle. If it succeeds, I’d like to see TCS there, too.

We will continue to enter uncharted territories. We’re not in the consumer business. Our business is only B2B, maybe we’ll get into B2C. Many such things can happen. And we have to do all of this without losing our value systems. That’s the last wish.

The financial services segment has been crucial to your performance. Reports suggest that FY23 may see this sector slow down on spending. How do you see BFSI panning out? BFSI is one of the earliest adopters of technology. And they consume the largest amount of technology talent and resources. Second, they are probably integrated with every other industry, because everybody needs finance. Almost every aspect of banking is changing and all that requires technology. The demand for such transformative solutions in the banking space is at an all-time high.

We are the largest provider of technology services. We have a solid play in the BFSI segment. We have built products and platforms across the sector. Our core banking product is top notch. Probably 30-35 per cent of the world’s population uses our product. For example, almost 90 per cent of the corporate actions processed in the world — whether dividend and bonus, or any other space — go through our platform. Likewise, in insurance we have built a very solid platform, with about 20-25 million policies administered across major markets.

In India, many insurance companies use our platform for processing policies and claims, in both life and non-life. We have very sophisticated knowledge of how business gets done in banking, capital markets, and successfully encapsulated that knowledge in building those platforms. For instance, we are now tracking regulatory changes in over 96 countries. These are reflected in our products.

Several brokerages have said that the peak is over for the IT sector, and FY23 will see pressure. This is reflected in stock performance, too. What are clients saying?

First, in discussions with clients, we have not heard anything abnormal. I don’t see anything which is showing me the wrong direction. Second, for the past decade, we have lived with uncertainty. We have seen that in such times companies have leveraged to transform, and you don’t pull a plug halfway.

There are fewer mega deals these days. How does this impact a company of TCS’S size?

For FY22 our total contract value (TCV) was $11.3 billion. Our quarterly run rate in TCV is $8-9 billion. About a year ago it was $6-7 billion. Mega deals will come once a year, twice a year, and if you are lucky, you get three. Our focus is to make sure that we have large deals, small deals, and mega deals.

What will be TCS’S 5G play?

We are supporting a number of customers in rolling out a 5G network. Our approach to 5G is three-dimensional. First, we will act as a systems integrator to integrate, deploy multiple heterogeneous infrastructure from leaders in that industry, then deploy that network, manage it, and operate it very well for our telco customers.

Second, how do I help enterprises build a private 5G network within their facilities, complying with the laws of the land, and act as a systems integrator to bring in the required telecom equipment. Third, leverage these two network layers to build vertical applications on top of it. It’s a huge opportunity. Our strength is software, and more and more of the network is getting softwarised, so we have a bigger role to play beyond the applications.