HCL to develop instant payment solutions, centres of excellence in partnership with Volante

Srinivasan Seshadri, global head of financial services and chief growth officer at HCL, said in a press statement that the collaboration will create payment platforms that HCL’s clients can use to establish a “scalable and flexible payment ecosystem”, and “develop faster time to market capabilities.” He added that the partnership will look to further develop “payments as a service for financial institutions, and help banks modernize their payments infrastructure.”

Deepak Gupta, senior vice-president and global head of payments-as-a-service and strategic partnerships at Volante, said that the partnership will give the company access to regional resources and gather “local knowhow”, which would be further added to the firm’s engineering capabilities.

The partnership comes amid a phase of slowdown in banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) products for global IT firms, leading to industry analysts expecting a slowdown in the revenue growth pace for homegrown IT services firms. To be sure, BFSI firms contribute to nearly 30% of the ₹10.2 trillion ($12.4 billion) revenue earned every year by India’s IT sector. The slowdown of tech spending in the financial services market is largely based on inflationary and macroeconomic concerns arising in the North American and European markets, driven by the crash of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse, among other incidents.

Based on such slowdowns, Mint reported on April 3 that domestic IT firms could be looking at a mid-single digit revenue growth pace in FY24, as other sectors such as healthcare and manufacturing also cut down on discretionary IT expenditures.

This, however, could see a larger volume of smaller and longer-term IT deals being signed through the year. Earlier today, fellow IT services firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced that it won a cyber security deal with the Norwegian central government’s railway operations agency, Bane NOR.

HCL and Volante added in their joint statement that the companies are working with “some of the largest banks in the world” to bring their joint solutions to the market, without offering details of their initial clientele. The companies also did not offer a timeline for by when would the joint CoEs would be established. However, they added that a “multi-regional team of specialists” would be ramped up in their CoEs over the upcoming three years.