The last month has wiped out most of the optimism that Indian solution providers (SPs) harbored about being sheltered from the US slowdown. The fiscal tornado that leveled the US financial market has spread to Europe. The Indian finance minister has since kept assuring local entrepreneurs that India was insulated from these problems.

But organizations, which were dependent on US companies for business, started seeing a slide in trade. A lot of you might have already suffered from a business slowdown in the past two quarters and it is time to take stock on how to weather the next year.

SPs in India are now scanning the international business scenario with concern because the banking, finance, services and insurance segment contributes around 30-40 percent to their overall revenue, more or less. And there is no doubt that with financial institutions tightening their purse strings, they will focus on investing in only core or those technology areas which will ultimately reduce their costs.

Luckily, analysts state that the financial services industry comprising banking, capital markets and insurance companies (BFSI), will continue to look at outsourcing those areas of their business that will ultimately offer cost savings or cost containment. According to one survey, there are large untapped opportunities in BFSI around transaction processing, account servicing and credit card fraud management. While a lot of these are related to backend processes, there is no doubt that they are also looking at automating these processes using the online medium as much as is possible to make it the de facto mode for transacting business.

So this is the time for SPs who have a good number of banking companies in their client roster to explore offering solutions that facilitate business acquisitions, account servicing, investment operations, registrar and transfer functions, and fund accounting. And if you cater to insurance companies then you should consider offering solutions that will aid policy servicing, customer service, finance and accounting, new business acquisition and claims processing.

This is the time to put your thinking caps on and see how you can make the best of the worst scenario leveraging on your domain expertise. Because we function in a global economy, and whether we like it or not, we are dependent on the well being of the economies of international markets to ensure we grow our business.

This is also a good time to scout for domestic opportunities to balance the slowdown in the global market. Of course getting these opportunities will take time. Till then it is the time for all SPs to make judicious financial planning to ride through this storm.

Vinita Bhatia
vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in

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