Sanat Rao, vice-president and global head
of Finacle sales at Infosys, revealed that the implementation would
be conducted on a staggered basis, with the Paraguay phase expected
to go live in ten to twelve months’ time. “BBVA wants to
concentrate on South America in the first phase, as well as a
handful of European countries,” he told RBI.

BBVA released details of
a major IT transformation plan in May 2007 and said it planned to
invest around €5.6 billion in technology by 2010 as part of a wider
target of achieving a 20 percent increase in customer numbers, to
8.5 million, by the same date.

While the relationship marks a key step in
BBVA’s growth strategy, for Infosys the deal points to a growing
tendency for banks to take a more direct approach to IT
improvements.

The breadth of functionality offered by
Finacle has found favour with numerous banks looking to make such
improvements. Infosys says that the solution, which in its latest
version is also able to accommodate Islamic banking and mobile
banking offerings, is now in place at 109 banking groups across 60
countries. That amounts to 160 million customers, 230 million
accounts and a peak of 69 million banking transactions a day, the
firm adds.

“We have invested over $60 million in the
last three years to build a state-of-the-art banking solution,”
said TV Mohandas Pai, member of the board and director – human
resources at Infosys, earlier this year. Accordingly, Rao suggests
that Infosys was selected for the deal because of the fully
integrated nature of the Finacle package. The Finacle Universal
Banking Solution will see the service implemented across core
banking, CRM, treasury and wealth management services within BBVA
throughout the bank’s operations across the world.

“This is something that is clearly lacking
in banks which have a multitude of legacy systems”. That, though,
may now be set to change. Rao believes that a period of
deliberation has now given way to a more proactive environment.

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“Clearly we’re seeing a lot of action in
the tier one and tier two banking segments in the sense that banks
are now consciously making changes – they’re now making the big
step forward… I don’t think they ever doubted the need to do so;
it was rather a question of risk.”

That trend is proving to be a boon for
Infosys. The firm has signed a deal similar in size to the BBVA
agreement with “a large bank operating out of the Far East and in
multiple geographies”, added Rao, who declined further elaboration
citing contractual obligations. For the BBVA deal, implementation
methods, however, remain varied.

Rather than beginning the conversion at
home, Finacle will only be implemented in BBVA’s domestic market of
Spain following a successful rollout in other territories, said
Rao. The nature of the deal also means that financial terms are not
yet concrete.

“Detailed scoping of the project in
multiple countries is still to be done. It will be a while before
the bank and ourselves can get a full understanding of what the
scope of work will be over the next couple of years,” he added.

Rao also believes that the overhaul is
likely to lead to further changes at BBVA.

“The bank is not just looking at replacing
one piece of software with another – there is an element of
transformation here. There is going to be a standardisation of
processes, and I’m sure they’ll look at their product portfolio and
do a rationalisation of products”.

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