Wipro, India's third-largest IT outsourcing company, is scouting the US market for talent to manage its growing consultancy business. The company is increasing headcount in the US, primarily in the banking and financial services consulting vertical.
"Around half of our consultant base works locally in the US and in Europe. We are localising our hiring for consulting services in these geographies through significant hiring at senior levels and also through campuses," said Anurag Srivastava, vice-president, Wipro Consulting Services. Within consulting, the company is increasing its focus on the key segment, banking risk and compliance consulting practice in the US market, where it plans to hire about 300 professionals with strong domain-skills.
Industry sources said that high-end consulting assignments were springing up in the US, thanks to a number of banks migrating to core banking solutions in line with Basel II requirements.
"Consulting jobs require all-round skills and knowledge of banking regulations, besides strong understanding of technology services. The banking risk and compliance practice requires close interactions between account teams, service line owners and the domain consulting team, besides a strong go-to-market strategy. Wipro is looking at people who can provide domain-centric solutions, who can collaborate actively on solution development with the business transformation and BPO teams," according to a human resources industry source.
Srivastava said that given the current economic context and pressure on the BFSI segment, Wipro saw business and operational risk and compliance as a focus area. "The differentiation here is to derive business value from compliance. We do not see a particular skew on shared services, but any transformation of business models that can yield high short-term as well as long-term cost efficiency are clearly welcome."
He added that increasing protectionism in the US and Europe was leading to IT companies stepping up their hiring plans in these geographies. Wipro was aware of the risks of protectionism, and since January this year, has added a good number of senior team members in the F&A (finance & accounting), Business Risk and Business Transformation, Change Management and key industry segments. The company is also looking at hiring fresh recruits from campuses.
The consulting business for Wipro, which was not looking up till January this year, has seen a significant rise in February-March, especially in the US. Wipro and rivals like TCS, Infosys and HCL expect to see continued demand for specialised consultants in the coming quarters.
"The synergy of technology and process creates innovative value which will bring down cost of operations. Hence, specialisation will be in great demand," Srivastava said.
Wipro showed consolidated revenues of Rs 25,700 crore (Rs 275 billion) in fiscal 2009.
Cash and bank balances at the end of the fourth quarter ended March 31, 2009 totalled Rs 4,900 crore (Rs 49 billion). About 8 per cent of Wipro's 97,810 employees in FY 2009 were non-Indian.
