TCS bags digital transformation deal from South African investment bank

Tata Consultancy Services on Monday announced that it has been appointed by South Africa’s Absa Corporate and Investment Bank (CIB) to digitally transform its investment banking services. The company will offer its ‘BaNCS’ platform to enable on-cloud trading and investment services for Absa CIB’s clients.

The companies said in a joint statement that as part of the agreement, TCS will power Absa CIB’s front- and mid-end operational services, which include trade management, clearing and settlement of trades, and other “operational and administrative” services for asset managers, stock brokers and other users of Absa’s service.

TCS said that its BaNCS platform is used across 450 locations around the world, and covers “more than 1 billion” accounts for banking networks around the world.

The services will be hosted on Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) cloud platform, and will help Absa improve speed as well as safety of transactions, the companies said.

To be sure, investment banking operators have been increasingly using cloud services to migrate their businesses to digital platforms. In November last year, US-based multinational investment bank and services firm, Goldman Sachs, announced a financial cloud service based on AWS. The service offers data management and analytics to help investment banking operators migrate from legacy operational infrastructures, the investment firm said at Amazon’s re:Invent technology conference last year.

According to AWS, global financial service operators that use its cloud services include Germany’s Allianz, UK’s Barclays Group, USA’s Stripe, and others

Technology service providers such as TCS’ BaNCS use AWS to build financial services atop the cloud platform, which is subsequently offered to clients such as Absa CIB to migrate their services to digital platforms.

Sabir Ballim, head of investor services at Absa CIB, said that the use of TCS BaNCS will help the investment banking platform “develop new products” for traders and investors on their portfolio.