Report:

Magic Quadrant for Finance and Accounting Business Process Outsourcing

Top Vendor Products for Finance and Accounting Business Process Outsourcing in 2023

• Accenture
• Capgemini
• EXL
• Genpact
• IBM
• Infosys
• TCS
• Wipro
• WNS

Finance and Accounting Business Process Outsourcing Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

• Accenture - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Fast-tracking of industry-specific solutions: Accenture prepackages process redesigns and transformation maps, including maps of technology solutions, across four industry archetypes: product focus, capital-intensive, digital products, and financial and services. Together, these serve over 19 prioritized industries. This upfront endeavor enables industry-specific needs for finance to be addressed at the technology-scoping phase.
  • Strong track record on digital migration: In the past 12 months, Accenture has deployed its SynOps, AI-powered automation platform to more of its existing customers. It has also redoubled its efforts to evaluate customers' process maturity using its operations maturity framework, which assesses maturity on four levels: foundational, automated, insight-driven and intelligent. Together, these practices have realized more digitalization opportunities for customers at speed and scale.
  • Unified digital finance operations: Accenture's integrated approach to its compressed transformation offering brings its consulting, operations and technology business units together to meet CFOs' requirements for faster transformation planning and implementation. This approach maps the customer's journey to intelligent operations. Combining these assets into a single managed service promotes better governance practices and enables higher resilience.

  Cons:

  • Prevalence of headcount-based contract fees: Accenture continues to offer contract fees based on headcount, with 35% of its F&A customers contracting to this full-time equivalent (FTE) pricing model. These customers are missing out on Accenture's more transparent pricing alternatives, which are outcome-focused and better suited to migrations to digital finance solutions, such as its total-value-enabled (gain-sharing) model.
  • Customer experience concerns on attrition: Discussions with users of Gartner's client inquiry service, together with evidence from Gartner's Peer Insights platform, indicate some customer concerns about staff turnover. Buyers should ask about Accenture's business continuity measures and attrition level track record insights to help ensure they receive reliable services.
  • Limited marketing for midsize enterprises: Online reviews, testimonials and case studies from midsize enterprises about Accenture's digital finance transformation capabilities and successes are limited to buyers. Accenture tends to highlight the work it does with "large-enterprise marquee" clients.


• Capgemini - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Innovation strategy focused on customer ideation: Capgemini has put transformation and innovation councils at the heart of its digital offering. Its Transformation and Innovation Office (TIO) and Chief Outcome Officer role are giving CFOs more frequent visibility into how business outcomes are being met and opportunities to improve processes and technologies.
  • Helpful upgrades to digital products: Capgemini remains focused on its Frictionless Finance offering, which has received timely updates in the past 12 months. These have focused on business outcome frameworks and a renewed commitment to increasing existing clients' adoption of digital twins, which can simulate process changes before a customer selects a technology.
  • Transformation governance track record: At the time of writing, Capgemini has one of the strongest scores for governance of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant, as judged by customers who have completed reviews on Gartner's Peer Insights platform. Capgemini has also demonstrated its ability to maintain transparency in data and process control when digitally transforming finance operations.

  Cons:

  • Concerns about customer experience: Discussions with users of Gartner's client inquiry service, together with evidence from Gartner's Peer Insights platform, indicate that Capgemini's quality has declined in the past 12 months and point to inconsistency in its knowledge transfer practices. Customers identify staff attrition as a cause.
  • Fewer midsize enterprise clients: Eighty-nine percent of Capgemini's F&A BPO clients are large enterprises, which is a larger percentage than for other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Midsize enterprises and startups considering this vendor should evaluate its ability to supply the specific expertise required to meet their needs.
  • Lower adoption for some purchase-to-pay processes: Capgemini has a lower-than-average adoption rate for purchase order (PO) processing and approval management, in comparison with other Leaders. Buyers should evaluate Capgemini's proprietary and partnered technology solutions that cater for these activities in order to achieve true end-to-end digital processing for P2P.


• CES - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Innovation focused on core finance: CES offers a suite of accounting-focused proprietary solutions specific to fund accounting and has a clear roadmap for further development of ESG accounting and real-time net asset value calculations. Its analytical suite assesses workforce performance and includes simplified proprietary workflow solutions in every process, which reduces cost and increases efficiency.
  • Offering strategy for the financial sector: CES prioritizes accounting-process support for the financial services industry. It plans to strengthen its offerings in this sector by including Acuity proxy-voting support and event life cycle management.
  • Customer experience of governance: CES meets its clients' specific needs with an effective governance model. Its data and regulatory compliance procedures are well-demonstrated. Evidence from Gartner's Peer Insights platform backs this up, with customers giving positive impressions of CES's governance ability.

  Cons:

  • Limited digital product offering: CES offers process-focused workflow solutions, but its overall digital transformation offering lags behind those of other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Other Niche Players offer specialized digital analytics, as well as hyperautomation solutions, on top of process digitalization.
  • Prevalence of headcount-based contract fees: CES offers contract fees based on headcount, with 62% of its F&A customers currently contracting to this FTE pricing model. These customers are missing out on the provider's more transparent pricing alternatives, which are outcome-focused and more suitable when migrating to digital finance solutions focused on touchless processing.
  • Limited geographic strategy: Most of CES's services are still delivered from its core centers in India, its original market. Although it opened new delivery centers in Costa Rica and Mexico City for its U.S. clients in 2022, CES still operates from fewer locations than other vendors that offer similar services and that appeal to clients in various regions in multiple languages. Consequently, CES has fewer local-language offerings.


• Cognizant - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Continued investment in digital products: Cognizant Neuro (launched in 2021) is an intelligent technology service layer supportive of AI-led automation sequencing. It is now focused on delivering augmented finance through reusable taxonomies to increase the speed and quality of transformations.
  • Response to market's need for touchless processing: Cognizant is updating its use of a framework focused on policy, process redesign and technology. It is investing in getting clients to "touchless" process environments by building in compliance, determining optimal workflows, and orchestrating the relationship between ERP and bolt-on technologies like robotic process automation and AI.
  • Investment in operational flexibility: During the past year, Cognizant established a process-mining center of excellence with Celonis and FortressIQ to meet clients' process improvement needs. In response to clients' requirements to accelerate the transformation process, it also rolled out a citizen development training program for its employees to help identify and develop automation solutions.

  Cons:

  • Business model focus limited to task automation: There is still a disconnect between the task automation capabilities that Cognizant currently offers and the bolder, AI-focused promise of Cognizant Neuro and its application to finance operations. Cognizant's F&A BPO business model does not demonstrate an ability to shift from task automation to process-intelligent workflows.
  • Limited customer experience insights: Cognizant lacks testimonials from finance clients and does not demonstrate insights into current customers' satisfaction with its finance transformation. There is a risk that clients will engage with Cognizant for transformation services without adequate information about existing customers' experiences with these.
  • Potentially confusing offering strategy: Cognizant positions Neuro and its Digital Finance & Accounting services as separate offerings. Its digital finance services showcase advanced configuration options, real-time data-driven decision making and touchless processing, but these features overlap with Cognizant Neuro's capabilities. This creates a risk that some buyers might not adopt services from Cognizant that have been designed to digitalize finance operations.


• Conduent - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Business model focused on end-to-end processing: Conduent covers the P2P process comprehensively, with a focus on analytics and auditing. Digital features are prevalent across its P2P offering. The vendor's deep subject matter expertise adds value for certain industries, such as manufacturing.
  • Innovation strategy focused on fraud prevention: Conduent differentiates itself by productizing its FastCap fraud analytics solutions. Much of its digital technology innovation — AI and intelligent workflows, for example — is embedded in these software solutions.
  • Track record of P2P transformations: Conduent has several strong case studies in the P2P process area, based on the experiences of its current clients. The vendor showcases these case studies and other relevant marketing messages well on its website and in presentations.

  Cons:

  • Limited offering strategy: Conduent's offering strategy lacks a clear roadmap for services and functions for the wider O2C and R2R transactional and accounting areas of finance. Prospective buyers may struggle to understand its capabilities beyond P2P managed services.
  • Narrow industry sector knowledge: Sixty percent of Conduent's clients are in the manufacturing industry. Conduent focuses on the development of industry-specific solutions, mainly for the automotive manufacturing sector. Its remaining client base is spread thinly across seven different sectors, for which it offers limited industry solutions.
  • Operational commitment focused on basic service levels: Conduent's approach to SLAs is operationally focused. A more solution-oriented, value-added approach would benefit its offering. Buyers increasingly expect innovation plans and continuous improvement opportunities to replace SLA-focused objectives, so as to improve the maturity of their processes.


• Datamatics - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Deep manufacturing-industry experience: Datamatics offers a portfolio of intelligent proprietary digital solutions, including inbound delivery, spend analytics and autopay scheduling solutions. These process-oriented solutions are likely to strengthen its position with its manufacturing clients.
  • Product strategy focused on modular applications: Datamatics takes a modular, customizable approach to its core product suite. It offers end-to-end coverage of core back-office finance processes and, for midsize organizations, FP&A. It partners with platform vendors including Amazon Web Services, Automation Anywhere, Microsoft (Azure) and UiPath.
  • Inclusion of AI in innovation roadmap: Datamatics is focused on strengthening its digital finance offering. Its innovation and product development roadmap now includes features such as a unified intelligent automation platform, mobility-enabled services, cognitive document capture, and AI-/ML-based enhancements across various processes.

  Cons:

  • Limited track record of end-to-end process adoption: A low percentage of Datamatics' client base contracts for end-to-end R2R processes. Basic process activities such as journal entry and reconciliations are not adopted by its customers. Customers for whom wide coverage of the R&R process is important should further evaluate this vendor capabilities.
  • Limited geographic coverage: Datamatics' customers are served mainly from its Asia/Pacific service delivery centers — it has only one F&A delivery center in North America and none in EMEA. Buyers should favor vendors with delivery centers close to their operations and with digital transformation programs, as offshore issues, such as time zone differences, risk delaying projects.
  • Prevalence of headcount- and transaction-based contract fees: Datamatics mainly offers contract fees based on headcount or transactions; only 10% of its F&A customers contract to outcome-based pricing. Customers who choose, or remain on, headcount- or transaction-based contracts and wish to adopt digital services have little opportunity to improve their processes or further reduce the cost of their operations.


• Deloitte - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Comprehensive geographic footprint: Deloitte has a large delivery ecosystem in over 100 countries and expects to expand its footprint across key regions to meet demand. It demonstrates its expectation that delivery footprint growth will not equate to FTE growth by focusing on deploying digital assets as alternatives to human resources.
  • Differentiated business model: Deloitte offers a build-operate-transform-transfer service as part of its business model, a capability not commonly offered in the F&A BPO market. Its core operate-to-transform offering focuses on transforming finance operations as a managed service provider, while also differentiating itself by building skills and governance in the captive organization when transferring operations back.
  • Marketing execution focused on thought leadership: Deloitte continues to invest in global, cross-industry, multifunctional research into BPO. Resulting outputs include CFO-specific publications and events relating to finance service delivery models. Understandably, its recommendations include using its F&A outsourcing offering.

  Cons:

  • Product strategy for proprietary solutions: Deloitte's product offering for core finance areas relies on partnerships with other technology vendors. Although it has its own purpose-built platform and analytic layers, Deloitte does not not demonstrate plans to develop proprietary intelligent business process workflow capabilities across P2P, O2C and R2R.
  • Limited customer experience insights: Deloitte has only a limited number of testimonials and case studies that share customers' experiences of its finance outsourcing services for digital finance transformation. Its website offers relatively few insights about customers' satisfaction with its Deloitte Operate offering for finance.
  • Limited insight into end-to-end process offering strategy: Deloitte's F&A managed services offering strategy offers relatively few insights into its current and evolving P2P, O2C and R2R functionalities. There is limited detail about how each workstream offers digital finance capabilities to prospective buyers. Deloitte's AIOPS.D, an end-to-end autonomous process offering, launched in 2022 and is being piloted in the source-to-pay and order-to-cash areas.


• Exela Technologies - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Offering strategy focused on standardizing: Exela provides F&A solutions across P2P, O2C and R2R that make use of its in-house, cloud-based multitenant architecture. F&A subject matter experts and data scientists focus on standardizing end-to-end activities that have led to better uptake of digital solutions.
  • Notable industry-specific solutions: Exela offers a full service for traditional F&A needs across the financial services, government and retail sectors. Two-thirds of its customer base is in the financial services and retail sectors. Its footprint in the U.S. government and semi-government sectors is also notable.
  • Help desk service flexibility: Exela can respond to urgent customer requests from any of its delivery centers. It uses a methodology to route urgent requests to the next available specialist across its global delivery centers, and has a 24-hour help desk. This standard of service reflects close collaboration between its network of delivery centers, and offers service flexibility to its clients.

  Cons:

  • Lack of profitability since public listing in 2018: In March 2023, Exela announced plans to improve its operating performance after another loss-making quarter and missed interest payments on its debt. The financial press has since published concerns about its business continuity in the short term.
  • Lack of end-to-end view in marketing messages: Exela's online messaging lacks detailed information for finance buyers about how it applies transformation expertise and methodologies to simplify end-to-end process solutions for finance. It does not communicate how Exela is investing in hyperautomation-enabling technologies to overcome finance challenges.
  • Lack of technology partners: The trend in this market is to offer a mix of proprietary and best-in-class external solutions, but the extent of Exela's partnering with external high-end digital solution providers is minimal. Potential customers should temper their technology expectations.


• EXL - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Investment in industry-specific solutions: EXL has accelerated its efforts to develop industry-specific F&A solutions. It has a clear strategy to develop its workforce to reflect the growing need for industry-specific F&A talent. Its biggest client sector is banking and insurance, for which it has developed solutions for regulatory reporting and actuarial accounting.
  • Renewed offering strategy: EXL has a strong vision that prioritizes a data-led approach to its finance services. Analytical insights into strategic and core finance processes aim to reduce the transactional processing burden as EXL takes a proactive approach to persuading customers to adopt its digital services.
  • Customer experience for staff agility: Customer reviews on Gartner's Peer Insights platform indicate that agility of staff, partnership and service professionalism are the top three reasons for recommending EXL. For overall satisfaction, EXL scored an average of 4.7 (out of 5), and it scored above 4 in over 30 reviews of its F&A services.

  Cons:

  • Limited track record for small-enterprise solutions: EXL has limited differentiation in its transformation methodology to cater for buyers from SMBs. Only 15% of EXL's F&A BPO deals are with SMBs (those with less than 1,000 employees). Other vendors in this Magic Quadrant are meeting the growing demand for outsourcing solutions for SMBs by customizing their transformation approach to meet these customers' nuanced requirements.
  • Service concerns caused by geographic strategy: EXL's network of 38 delivery centers is mostly in Asia/Pacific. Buyers are increasingly evaluating "nearshore" delivery centers, and EXL has customer reviews on Gartner's Peer Insights platform that indicate slower communication and process handoffs between Asia/Pacific and the U.S., due to time zone constraints.
  • Prevalence of headcount-based contract fees: EXL continues to offer contract fees based on headcount, with 78% of its F&A customers contracting to this FTE pricing model. These customers are missing out on more transparent pricing alternatives that are outcome-focused and more suitable when migrating to digital finance solutions focused on touchless processing.


• Genpact - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Innovation strategy focused on AI-led capabilities: New and existing customers are adopting Genpact Cora, the vendor's intelligent suite of modular proprietary and partnered technologies. Its maturity model component enables maturity assessments across processes, policies, technologies, controls, metrics and operations. Strong product capability scores reflect this on Gartner's Peer Insights platform.
  • Operational execution with technology partner ecosystem: Genpact continues to use its enterprise applications, SaaS providers and cloud providers' partners to drive operational excellence. It is investing further in its data and analytics business. As a result, at the time of writing, Genpact's service delivery flexibility rating on Gartner's Peer Insights platform is above average, at 4.75 (out of 5), and above 4 for more than 20 reviews of its F&A services.
  • Solution strategy messaging focused on outcomes: Genpact has prioritized investments in its "00001" finance vision ("zero time to close, zero time to insight, zero touch processing, zero exception and one holistic experience") via IP framework creation, digital solutions and patents. Its focus on outcome-based deliverables is meeting clients' needs, and buyer adoption rates have improved.

  Cons:

  • Less adoption of some processes: Genpact has a relatively low number of F&A customers contracting for end-to-end requisition and PO processing, PO approval management, customer scheduling and order processing, but it does have solutions available for these purposes, and they are a focus area. Low adoption levels might lead to deprioritization of further development of digital solutions, leaving customers with more manual services.
  • Mixed track record with continuous improvement: Discussions with users of Gartner's client inquiry service, together with evidence from Gartner's Peer Insights platform indicate that some Genpact customers are receiving limited suggestions about process transformation and improvement opportunities. Migrating these customers to newer digital capabilities requires a proactive track record of continuous improvement.
  • Client retention rate: Genpact's client retention rate for 2022 was lower than the average for Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. Genpact prioritizes client relationships, and all its digital transformation clients renewed contracts between 2021 and 2022. However, buyers should evaluate customers' loyalty during the selection process by referring to Gartner's Peer Insights platform.


• HCLTech - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Product strategy for transforming core finance: HCLTech's Digital Discovery Framework identifies process opportunities that enable an intelligent workflow for core finance processes. It includes digitalCOLLEAGUE, an intelligent orchestration platform that combines technologies and algorithms used for data extraction, validation and task automation.
  • Geography strategy focused on remote capabilities: HCLTech offers a remote service delivery capability, in addition to its physical service delivery centers, to meet the need for global service coverage. It offers a "work from anywhere" (WFA) solution in a secured, cloud-based environment that integrates adaptability with security specifically for clients with a remote or hybrid workforce.
  • Offering strategy enhanced by IT capabilities: HCLTech is focused on combining its IT assets with digital process outsourcing to take advantage of what it sees as an era of productization. It has begun by introducing 360-degree O2C solutions.

  Cons:

  • Limited online marketing for digital solutions: HCLTech has limited messaging about its F&A capabilities on its website. This limits buyers' ability to learn about its core and strategic F&A process offerings. Other vendors publish client testimonials about their transformation success and thought pieces about disruptive finance technologies.
  • Business model's reliance on a manual servicing approach: Although HCLTech offers a custom framework for its transformation services, it follows a standard methodology for transformation change requests. This is mostly a manual process, without extensive use of digital tools to manage and enhance it. As a result, customers might experience slower progress from transformation plan to execution.
  • Prevalence of headcount-based contract fees: HCLTech continues to offer contract fees based on headcount, with approximately 70% of its F&A BPO customers currently contracting to this FTE pricing model. These customers are missing out on more transparent pricing alternatives that are outcome-focused and more suitable when migrating to digital finance solutions focused on touchless processing.


• IBM - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Progress of digital business model: The recent double-digit customer growth of IBM's F&A BPO business is testimony to the success of recent changes to its operating model. Buyers can select from proprietary solutions, partnered solutions or IBM's larger ecosystems, enabling them to offload design, build and implementation activities to IBM.
  • Operations focused on achieving acceleration: IBM shares a "get on the curve, stay on the curve" framework with its finance clients. It aims to shift their focus from resource efficiency toward orchestration of digital drivers (such as workflows) to accelerate growth and benefits for these clients, usually with the aim of delivering outcomes within a year.
  • Marketing execution for transformation services: IBM has published detailed use cases for its transformation methodologies. These make it easier to understand how its Enterprise Process Innovation Continuum (EPIC) and the IBM Garage methodology enable practices to be mapped to customers' transformation programs.

  Cons:

  • Limited messaging about unified finance platform: IBM's focus on putting customers' technology needs first is welcome, but IBM lacks an easily understood finance-branded message about its digital finance platform offering. As a result, buyers might overlook key offerings from IBM when evaluating digital finance workflow solutions.
  • Limited customer experience insights: IBM has limited testimonials from digital finance transformation clients on its website, and it offers no insights to prospective buyers about existing customers' satisfaction with finance offerings. Without these insights, there is a risk that customers might not evaluate IBM's capabilities as a BPO provider.
  • Limited customer adoption for some finance processes: IBM has low customer adoption for some finance processes, such as credit management and cost accounting — less than 30% of its clients contract for these. This figure is below the average for Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. Customers might have to rely on third-party technology for these services.


• Infosys - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding integrated with CFO challenges: Infosys has reevaluated its response to how increasingly complex the CFO's role is becoming. It has also demonstrated its domain-led augmented services, such as the APSI offering. It has shifted its compliance output from a detective to a preventative regime, while staying true to its core finance operation offerings through its Live Enterprise for finance solution.
  • Business model supported by IT capabilities: Infosys specializes in SAP S/4HANA deployments, specifically for finance organizations, and leverages its heritage as a service integrator. Finance customers benefit from a shared center of excellence that has capabilities, such as ML-based ticketing, to build resilience during ERP releases.
  • Operational improvements to serve midsize and small enterprises: Infosys has demonstrated improvements to diversify its portfolio across midsize and small enterprises. Infosys is meeting a growing need from midsize and small enterprises, which now account for 45% of its F&A BPO business, up from 35% since 2020.

  Cons:

  • Potentially confusing solution strategy: Infosys lags behind other Leaders in this Magic Quadrant when it comes to offering a simplified, easily understood finance platform brand. Infosys' complex catalog of finance solutions contrasts with the more unified approach taken by other vendors. As a result, buyers might overlook some of this vendor's valuable solutions.
  • Customer experience concerns about service flexibility: Reviewers of Infosys' F&A BPO services on Gartner's Peer Insights platform have indicated that the vendor needs to extend its proactive outreach, improve process insights and increase service flexibility. Buyers are increasingly evaluating providers' ability to proactive advise them about opportunities to improve process capabilities and service delivery.
  • Limited track record of process discovery adoption: Only 27% of Infosys' F&A customers contracted for process mining as of 31 December 2022. Compared with other Leaders in this Magic Quadrant, this figure is below the average. Customers might be unable to spot process transformation opportunities quickly, unless they use process discovery technologies.


• Sutherland - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Data-focused market understanding: Sutherland meets CFOs' needs with predictive analysis, automated forecasting and reporting. It does so by ensuring BPO talent profiles and digital data-led solutions are the enablers of automated finance processing, as demonstrated by its investment in F&A Digital Fabric.
  • Business model's suitability for midmarket: Sutherland pays specific attention to the midmarket by offering flexible operating models, based on operational expenditure instead of capital expenditure, via BPaaS solutions.
  • Track record of delivering business outcomes: Sutherland can offer high-risk, high-reward commitments to customers by prioritizing upfront the calculations and data required to support a business-outcome-based model. Sutherland takes a data-led approach to proposing outcome-based commercial models, as exhibited by its pricing model methodology for winning business and track record for customer experience.

  Cons:

  • Relatively few examples of third-party software usage: Sutherland has published few use cases on how third-party provider technologies are used in its finance transformation deals. Customers requiring finance process functionality that cannot be met by proprietary solutions should evaluate this vendor's third-party finance partnership capabilities.
  • Limited marketing execution for digital solutions: Sutherland's marketing for its Digital Finance service has limited details about its Prodigy Digital Automation Platform, its outcome-driven methodology and how it supports digital transformation efforts. Buyers may struggle to distinguish this vendor's digital offerings from those of a traditional BPO provider.
  • Limited customer experience insights: Sutherland has only a limited number of testimonials from digital finance transformation clients on its website, and it offers no insight to buyers about existing customers' satisfaction with its digital finance offering. Without this insight, customers may struggle to evaluate Sutherland's digital capabilities as a BPO provider.


• TCS - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product strategy focused on unified platform: TCS continues to focus on the TCS Cognix Platform, an AI-driven suite designed to orchestrate multiple technologies, platform solutions and process benchmarking. Ninety percent of TCS's finance customers use this intelligent business process suite for transactional and accounting finance processes.
  • Incorporation of crowdsourced funding into sales strategy: TCS offers a fund for clients wanting to experiment with proofs of concept and emerging technologies. Its "ideathon" program tracks the crowdsourcing of ideas from its clients for an interactive continuous improvement experience.
  • Investment in advanced analytics: The TCS Decision Fabric and Vitellius reporting solutions offer prebuilt analytical models and advanced data visualization platforms for visual analytics. These solutions are further differentiated by the ability to integrate them into buyers' existing technology stacks either on-premises or in a cloud.

  Cons:

  • Slow improvement of offering strategy: TCS's offering strategy has not progressed as quickly as those of other Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. Its competitors explain how their intelligent platforms remove human intervention from finance workflows, whereas TCS focuses on offerings involving, for example, the metaverse, without clearly demonstrating their utility for finance purposes.
  • Prevalence of headcount-based contract fees: TCS offers contract fees based on headcount, with 55% of its F&A customers contracting to this FTE pricing model. These customers are missing out on more transparent pricing alternatives that are outcome-focused and more suitable when migrating to digital finance solutions focused on touchless processing.
  • Customer experience concerns about service essentials: At the time of writing, reviewers of TCS on Gartner's Peer Insights platform indicate concerns about transformation planning and transition. Customers have also highlighted problems with staffing quality that have resulted in contractual escalations; specifically, they point to a lack of talent skilled in meeting finance needs.


• Tech Mahindra - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Business model focused on talent availability: Tech Mahindra has prioritized mitigation of talent shortages with remote working arrangements for its employees. It plans to invest in training and "learning journeys" to prevent talent scarcity and retain clients in industry sectors such as manufacturing, retail and utilities where its core client base resides.
  • Operational improvements to serve midsize enterprises: Tech Mahindra has demonstrated improvements to diversify its portfolio for large and midsize enterprises. With growth in midsize customers up 35% since 2020, to 46% of its total customer base, Tech Mahindra has the largest share of midsize enterprises among the Niche Players.
  • Improvement of offering strategy through technology partnerships: Tech Mahindra's solution differentiation has improved with the use of technologies from partners such as Celonis and SAP Signavio. This collaborative approach helps Tech Mahindra assist customers with process discovery.

  Cons:

  • Limited track record for migration to digital services: Tech Mahindra has published few case study examples of, or insights into, how it has supported CFOs' transformations of finance operations to a digital state. Other Niche Players are showcasing to CFOs how their digital services' finance workflows can reduce the total cost of operations.
  • Omission of transformation abilities from marketing: Tech Mahindra has not published any F&A-specific transformation case studies or testimonials specific to migration success for digital capabilities. As a result, buyers might overlook its ability to digitalize their finance operations.
  • Limited industry-specific solutions: Compared with other Niche Players, Tech Mahindra has a limited plan for sector-specific offerings. Other Niche Players are fast creating finance solutions that meet industry-specific processing needs.


• Wipro - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Investment in industry-specific offerings: Wipro continues to develop over 60 industry-specific F&A solutions that align with its analytics business. It has one of the largest client bases in the banking, finance and insurance sector, and has developed a comprehensive set of finance software solutions under its Finstra partnership.
  • Client growth and retention: In 2022, Wipro registered double-digit growth in new F&A BPO clients, with an even distribution of finance customers contracting for O2C, R2R and P2P services. This has resulted in strong client retention and is supported by good customer feedback on Gartner's Peer Insights platform.
  • Intelligent service management business model: Wipro's Service Integration and Management (SIAM) solution enables service governance rigor, effective contract management and visibility across end-to-end performance parameters, with a consistent end-user experience. Wipro uses its SIAM framework to create IT and BPO synergies for technology-heavy transformation engagements.

  Cons:

  • Global delivery: Wipro still has more than half its delivery centers in Asia/Pacific. By contrast, other Leaders in this Magic Quadrant have a balanced global footprint to meet the demand for service close to customers' locations. There is a risk of slower turnaround times for transformation programs when delays occur between time zones.
  • Limited deals for chatbots, conversational AI and low-code application platforms: Only approximately 13% of Wipro's deals include chatbots and conversational AI, and only 5% include low-code applications. These are among the lowest adoption rates for a Leader in this Magic Quadrant.
  • Limited track record for SMB solutions: Wipro has limited differentiation in its transformation methodology to cater for SMBs (those with fewer than 1,000 employees). Only 5% of Wipro's F&A deals are with small enterprises. Other vendors in this Magic Quadrant are meeting the growing demand for outsourcing solutions for small enterprises by customizing their transformation approach to meet these customers' nuanced requirements.


• WNS - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Offering strategy focused on hyperautomation: Recent acquisitions position WNS to enhance its hyperautomation-enabled finance solutions. WNS demonstrates how, as a result of these acquisitions, it plans to offer customers more scope for expansion and to integrate processes across finance subfunctions. WNS's finance solutions are designed to support other functional requirements, improving more activities that are upstream in the business.
  • Product strategy enhanced by modularity capability: Under its Finance OneOffice model, WNS has simplified its end-to-end workflows for the quote-to-sustain process into modular solutions. This development enables buyers to adopt a solution suited to their level of technological maturity. WNS supports customers' plans to adopt more modules as their operations mature.
  • Understanding of CFOs' challenges: WNS's Finance OneOffice roadmap is designed to help CFOs make decisions. The cognitive capabilities it features will enable CFOs to move beyond incremental change and cost reduction priorities by providing analysis that prompts them to adopt solutions that are ready for the future as part of a holistic change management process.

  Cons:

  • Prevalence of headcount-based contract fees: WNS continues to offer contract fees based on headcount, with 45% of its F&A customers contracting to this FTE pricing model. These customers are missing out on the provider's more transparent pricing alternatives that are outcome-focused and more suitable when migrating to digital finance solutions focused on touchless processing.
  • Customer experience concerns about staff attrition: Discussions with users of Gartner's client inquiry service, together with evidence from Gartner's Peer Insights platform, indicate concerns about staff turnover — this is the No. 1 dislike identified by customers. Buyers should ask about this vendor's business continuity measures to help ensure service reliability.
  • Relatively slight track record for conversational AI and chatbots: Only approximately 20% of WNS's deals include chatbots and conversational AI. This rate is below the average for Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. AI capabilities are crucial for removing human involvement in finance operations.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Finance and Accounting Business Process Outsourcing, 10 May 2023, ID G00775356

View Market Definition
View Vendor Movements