Trojan Horse or Savior? IT Services Continue to Infiltrate Banking Operations

How far can it go? The relationship between large banks, financial services firms, and insurance companies - sometimes simply known by the acronym BFSI - and large IT services and outsourcing firms, like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, or Cognizant Technology Solutions (among several others), has become increasingly and consistently cozy and pervasive over the past decade or so. In the rearview mirror, this development makes total sense. We all now live in a perpetual "more for less" environment. And, if you can't achieve more-for-less, at least approximate the same functionality for less. So, with BFSI caught in a brutal post-GFC vice represented by unprecedented regulatory pervasiveness on one side and a lowest-rate, lowest-volatility market environment on the other, it makes total sense that a ton of legacy infrastructure, legacy software maintenance, and select semi-skilled, labor-intensive processes have gradually been offloaded to lowest-cost purveyors of these types of services. Clearly, this play has been quite popular. Though BFSI is certainly not the only client sector for global IT services - in fact, the diversity across sectors is broad, from logistics to [...]