‘SunGard is now focusing more on India’

MUMBAI, INDIA: SunGard entered India in 1993 and since then the company has ensured that every move it makes certainly gets counted and the market recognizes it. From setting up development centers to sales and support teams and head of India business, the company has made all the right moves with the changing times.

In this interview, Atul Sareen, SunGard Financial Systems India’s managing director, talks to CyberMedia News about the company’s business strategy in India, key market verticals and clients, along with growth expectations.

Since you took the charge of India business as managing director in 2009, what kind of strategy have you adopted to expand your presence in the markets? Also, can you brief on how its business has evolved over the past years?

SunGard has been present in India since 1993 with its development centers, currently based in Pune and Bangalore. In 2009 the India sales and marketing operations were established in Mumbai, and since then we have come a long way. We now have 20 plus team members which include sales, pre-sales and marketing who directly address the Indian business requirements in the Financial Services space. We have grown our customer base to almost 50 plus customers across various segments and have strong traction in the market. The SunGard brand is now fairly well recognized among our target markets.

At SunGard, we have a large portfolio of solutions across various segments in the financial services space. However, we have identified a set of offerings for India, based on the market requirements which could be driven by regulator changes or business needs and where gaps in solutions exist and obviously where we can add strong value to customer business based on our experience and expertise. This has helped us create a strong positioning for us in select areas and had helped fuel our expansion.

Which are the key verticals you are focusing on to gain clients in India? In the area of financial technology and solutions, what kind of market competition is seen with local as well as global software and solution vendors here?

We are focusing on a few segments in India - Banks, Capital Markets, Insurance, Trading, Energy and Commodities, Wealth Management. Key requirements that we are addressing are around Risk and Performance and treasury across Banks and NBFCs, Market and Credit Risk, Leasing and Asset management, Trading including Algorithmic trading, Actuarial and risk solution and consulting for Insurance apart from core systems for life, Power trading and operations.

We are also working on getting our solutions for corporate and asset management. As you see, we address solution across a few areas and do not have one company which we compete with across, instead we compete with different companies across various segments, both domestic and global software vendors. Again the idea is to distinguish ourselves in what we do and do it well.

To which verticals your Indian customers belong?

We have 50+ customers in India and are expanding this number rapidly. Insurance forms the biggest set of our customer where we work with most of the life Insurance companies. Banks, Brokerage and Trading, Energy and Commodities form the rest. We work closely with NBFCs as well. Some of our customers include Future Generali, Birla Sun Life, TATA Power and SREI.

What has been the company's annual growth rate over the past couple of years? How much growth you are expecting for the current fiscal?

Growth rate for the last couple of years have been significant. We have aggressive plans for India and it is a very focused market for SunGard. Going forward, we are looking at expanding our footprint among the existing customers in terms of the number of SunGard solutions used as well as acquiring newer customers in the current focused segments and also get more SunGard offering localized and ready for market. We will also add to our existing sales teams in India.