Executive Summary

There are very few companies in the IT services industry that do not claim Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) as one of their key focus areas. The reason is clear: as a leader in IT expenditure in absolute and relative terms, BFSI looks like an extremely good target. Understanding the real opportunity in BFSI and separating it from the general hype around this industry is very important for both:

• Strategic decision making
• Tactical sales planning and execution decisions

While often referred to as an industry, BFSI is far from being homogenous and consists of many sub-verticals, some of which are more important than others.  For the purposes of this whitepaper and to maintain actionable simplicity, we divide this industry into eight major sub-verticals:

• Insurance (Property & Casualty)
• Insurance (Life)
• Insurance (Accident & Health)
• Commercial Banking
• Consumer Financial Services
• Investment Services
• Savings and Loans Banks
• Miscellaneous Financial Services

This whitepaper presents an analysis of the outsourcing opportunity in each of these sub-segments individually. It attempts to quantify IT service opportunities in each sub-segment of BFSI and assemble a basic profile of this, undoubtedly, critical industry in the IT service marketplace. The uniqueness of this analysis is apparent in two very important aspects:

1. We conducted this research bottom-up. In other words, we did all the analyses individually for each company in the industry and then rolled them up to present the view of the whole BFSI industry (or a BFSI industry sub-vertical). We selected more than 2,000 companies in the BFSI industry to represent the industry in this analysis.
2. To derive the full view of real outsourcing opportunity in the BFSI industry, we used proprietary Everest methodology for opportunity estimation. We call this methodology EASE – Everest Approach to Sales-force Effectiveness.

The key result of our analysis is a comprehensive profile of the outsourcing opportunity in the BFSI industry along the following dimensions:

• What outsourcing services do the BFSI companies buy?
• How much are they buying or are likely to buy?
• Which suppliers are competing for the deals?
• What is the total industry opportunity?

All of the analyses were performed for each BFSI sub-vertical and separately for the buyers of different sizes in terms of their company revenues. This paper introduces Everest’s proprietary methodology for opportunity estimation and discusses:

• Critical importance of BFSI in the IT services marketplace
• Quantitative industry profile of IT service opportunities in financial services (FS)
• High-level analysis of opportunity at key BFSI industry players