Nitin Rakesh, CEO & executive director of Mphasis, said, “we are in early stages of a tech investment super cycle over the last two to three quarters and banks are leading that.”

Throwing more light on the banking and financial services and deal opportunities there, he said early in the in the crisis, there was a lot of provisioning on the balance sheet done by the banks and that means that they had a decline in their recorded profits. A lot of that is coming back now because given extreme amount of support from the Fed, and the government they really didn't see that level of impairment, either in consumer loans or mortgages, said Rakesh in an interview with CNBC-TV18.

From that perspective, they are in good shape and though interest rates have softened a little bit now but a little bit of uptick late last year helped as well, he said, adding that, “Good, strong balance sheets, not a lot of impairment, not a lot of financial stress, very good liquidity environment, good support from the Fed and the government, consumer spending extremely strong. At this point in time, we are seeing that confidence in a way translate into their ability to invest in the business, especially in tech because it becomes such a table stake issue for them to have good digital tech with engagement platform, good data platforms.”

“Therefore, we are actually starting to see what we are calling a tech investment, super cycle -- early stages of that over the last two to three quarters and banks are obviously leading that because they have seen the impact tech can bring with the emergence of some very large at scale companies that just got formed in the last 10 years,” he said.

“So, interesting environment, good strong tailwind growth mindset, good investment appetite but your competency is really the key because you have to be positioned in the right set of services for them to actually buy from you,” said Rakesh.

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When asked if they saw geographical mix changing for the company and whether they saw the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region growing faster. He said, “Purely based on the base, there's probably an opportunity for the India market to grow faster for us that means that we can continue to increase the contribution of non-US. But keep in mind, there's also 8- 9 percent rest of the world, which may or may not grow as fast because we are focused primarily on these core markets.”

There is an emerging bucket within the rest of the world that actually is also growing very fast, in Asia Pacific. So again, just based on size, the other markets can grow fast but given that US is our home market, we have a very strong focus on making sure that our growth here stays very strong as well.

“We don't have a target set for how much it should be US versus non-US but the target is, how can we make sure that we continue to grow healthy across markets, and as a company, we want to make sure that we have top year growth,” he said.

Talking about acquisitions, he said the three core factors they look at is intersection of capability, new customer acquisition and maybe new geography. “The company has been fairly consistent in the fact that we have defined the whole strategy around acquisitions coming out of their overall corporate strategy,” he added.

“So there is a build by partner approach,” he said, adding that they have done two competency acquisitions in the last two-and-half years and both of them have given them a lot of encouragement in how to integrate and how to blend them into their overall construct.

For more watch the accompanying video

(Edited by : Bivekananda Biswas)

First Published:Aug 18, 2021 4:39 PM IST