The Financial Express
Over the years, Genpact has evolved from a pure-play business process outsourcing (BPO) player to a data- and technology-driven partner to help clients in their digital transformation. NYSE-listed Genpact has more than 115,000 employees, majority of whom are based in India. NV ‘Tiger’ Tyagarajan, CEO, Genpact, talks about the company’s transformation, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) strategy, and technology trends, in an interview with Ayushman Baruah. Edited excerpts:
How has Genpact evolved from a pure-play BPO to a digital transformation company?
Genpact has a proud history of driving tangible business outcomes for clients in their transformation journeys. We started with industry domain and operations process expertise leveraging our history as part of GE. Many things remain constant from those early days, such as our maniacal focus on our clients. Over the past 10 years, we have significantly enhanced our domain and industry knowledge.
Also Read: BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT: Adding digital heft via acquisitions
Which domain areas did you particularly focus on?
We have built very strong muscle around data-tech-AI through organic and inorganic investments, and we identified a set of emerging areas as future key growth drivers over 5 years ago – risk services, supply chain services, and sales and commercial services to name a few. We are unique in the way we bring these capabilities together to create a full-stack solution for our clients. Today, we have two levers for transformation – data-tech-AI, where we design and build solutions that drive transformation for clients in their businesses, and digital operations, where we transform and change our clients’ operations, and run them to deliver higher levels of performance.
What is your M&A strategy for this year? What type and size of companies will you look at?
We continue to identify new opportunities as well as build differentiation in existing offerings through meaningful partnerships and acquisitions. Our recent acquisitions prove our commitment to build capabilities in data-tech-AI. Most recently, we acquired Hoodoo Digital, a digital experience consultancy with deep expertise in Adobe solutions. Prior to that, we acquired Enquero, a leading data engineering and analytics firm, enhancing our ability to develop new Cloud-based data and analytics solutions for clients. And before this, it was Something Digital, a company enabling end-to-end digital commerce that puts customer experience front and centre. Rightpoint has been doing very well with the team in India, growing dramatically in the last 3 years. Going forward, our strategy is to continue focussing on data-tech-AI services and work with more companies that can help us expand these capabilities in the domains and industries that we operate in, irrespective of the size of their business.
Also Read: Great AI results happen when there’s a good data strategy: Genpact Chief Digital Officer Sanjay Srivastava
Which technology areas are clients investing in today?
Today, every company continues to grapple with numerous challenges, including a 40-year high inflation, rising energy costs, and ongoing supply chain disruptions. In response, we have seen continued growth in our cloud-based data and analytics solutions across our focused areas, including supply chain, sales and commercial and risk services. Clients increasingly want to leverage their data across their organisations to build more meaningful insights and predictions that are then used for actions to deliver improved outcomes. This is happening for two reasons – first, we are embedding more telemetry and digital devices into our operating environments and opening up new sources of data that were not previously available. Second, using AI, all unstructured data in an enterprise can be easily converted, extracted and put to productive use.
Do you see a cut in client budget in certain areas like discretionary spending?
Demand for both our data-tech-AI and digital operation services remains strong as we continue to help clients address pressing challenges around cost and productivity, growth, mitigating risk and building long-term resiliency in their operating models. In these times, we believe the essential and non-discretionary nature of most of our services makes us even more valuable to our clients. In a time of inflationary pressures amid a looming global recession, we have seen some multistage, large-scale transformational client deals being broken up into medium-sized deals that deliver faster payback and return on investment. Many clients are finding ways to preserve strategic long-term transformational programs and looking at aggressive cost initiatives, in which we are often their partner, to help fund these engagements.
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