DEAL BEAT

EDS bags £160m Liverpool Victoria BPO deal
EDS has extended its presence in the financial services industry with a £160m, 13-year business process outsourcing (BPO) contract from Liverpool Victoria Friendly Society.

The deal entails a transformation programme including system consolidation, new workflow and imaging applications, process re-engineering and the handling of claims and back office functions at the mutual organisation.
EDS subsidiary Solcorp will use its Ingenium product for open book and new business processing. As an adjunct to this BPO contract, EDS will get a six-year £51m extension to an existing IT outsourcing agreement with Liverpool Victoria.

• TCS bags £120m contract from UK health service

TCS won a £120m (Rs 984 crore) contract from National Health Services (NHS), Britain ’s state-owned provider of health services. It involves creation and maintenance of electronic records for hospitals in Southern England.

The contract, part of a £896m project, is to be executed over nine years till ’13. TCS has won the contract as part of an alliance led by Fujitsu Services, according to information on the Fujitsu website.

Other companies in the fray included EDS, the second largest IT services firm in the world. The contract is part of a ten-year £5bn IT modernisation programme being undertaken by the NHS.

Earlier, a BT consortium had bagged the contract to develop and run the ‘data spine’ for the national care records system, which will be supported by infrastructure at the regional level by local service providers (LSP). BT, Accenture and CSC have already been awarded contracts for London, the North East, the Eastern region, the North West and Midlands.

• iGATE signs 5-year deal with GreenPoint

iGATE Global Solutions has entered into a five-year deal with the United States-based GreenPoint Mortgage to offer high-value back office services, valued at over $20 million.

The company reported that it was entering into this deal expecting it to exceed $20 million in contract value over five years. iGATE will add about 150 to 200 people over the next few months.
GreenPoint focuses on speciality mortgage loans, launching a new product every 21 days.
Eighty-five per cent of its business comes from independent mortgage brokers, with the rest from other banks and GreenPoint's retail channel.

•CSC bags $700m Swiss Re BPO deal

CSC won a $700m global business process outsourcing (BPO) deal with insurance group Swiss Re. CSC claims the 10-year contract with Swiss Re Life and Health is one of the largest ever BPO deals in the insurance sector. This new contract is an extension of an existing outsourcing agreement with Swiss Re dating back to 1995 and sees CSC's role expanding.

As part of the deal the IT services company will provide life and health insurance policy processing services for Swiss Re in the US and the UK. CSC's involvement has grown from 50,000 policies to the two million life and health insurance policies it currently processes in the US.

• WNS Global Services Acquires ClaimsBPO

WNS Global Services (WNS), a leading global Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) provider recently announced expansion of its BPO offerings for the healthcare sector by acquiring the business of ClaimsBPO, a leading provider of BPO services to the U.S healthcare industry. With the acquisition of the ClaimsBPO business, WNS is uniquely positioned to deliver comprehensive BPO offerings to healthcare clients including finance and accounting, claims processing and adjudicating services, CRM and data analytics solutions. According to IDC, the total value of the integration and outsourcing market for the healthcare industry is anticipated to be over $31 billion by 2004, underscoring the market potential for the firms serving this market.

• Accenture and Barclays deal

Barclays is set to sign a £450m IT outsourcing deal with Accenture that will see hundreds of software development jobs moved to India.
Barclays has selected Accenture over IBM for the six-year contract for the outsourcing of the bank's 'Build Services' application development group.
The contract will be worth some £75m per year and more than 1,000 software development jobs at Barclays' sites in Poole, Bexley Heath and Radbroke will be affected by the agreement, with up to half of those likely to be moved to India.

Confluence- Deal Beat

• IT jobs to India in Telstra-IBM deal

The deal between Telstra and IBM worth up to $200 million will see almost 500 Australian information technology jobs moving to India saving the telecom company about $75 million.

The four-year contract was finalised in India by Telstra technology, innovation and products chief Ted Pretty and chief information officer Jeff Smith and comes after a deal last year saw 180 jobs go the same way.

Telstra has renegotiated its contract with the US-based computing and consultancy giant to manage and develop a range of software applications as part of a program to cut up to $800 million in group-wide costs over three years. Telstra reports that the contract, which has been extended 18 months until 2008, was worth several hundred million dollars. In its 2002-03 annual report, Telstra forecast software capital spending with IBM over the next five years of $553 million.