HCL to create fast payment services, centres of excellence in collaboration with Volante

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 a 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 Rs 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, 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 throughout 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 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.