Chennai: Hard on the heels of bagging its largest client order of $500 million in the financial services vertical, Asia''s largest software company Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS) has launched its exclusive banking and financial services centre at Chennai.

The mega order will be spread over five years and will have the team from the new centre working on its implementation. The banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) vertical contributes 42 per cent of TCS'' revenues.

TCS expects similar-sized orders in the future, based on its request for proposals, though company officials reiterated that they would continue to have a judicious mix of big and small orders in the BFSI segment. TCS also has a good domestic presence in this segment.

Says Ravi Vishwanathan, vice president and head, Chennai operations, TCS, "Chennai will continue to be an arrowhead for growth for TCS, with key investments coming into the place." Currently Chennai has 15,000 employees working in core verticals such as BFSI, telecom, retail, travel and others.

TCS itself is realigning itself around such dedicated solution centres to provide better delivery to clients - such centres will be enable to handle the whole gamut of IT requirement from concept / consultancy through implementation / maintenance and business process outsourcing (BPO). Already the company has a dedicated solutions centre for insurance and infrastructure solutions.

While Chennai and Bangalore will continue to handle the BFSI clients, TCS Chennai will focus more on the financial services. "But core verticals will have satellite centres supporting them from other places including overseas - locational support is also needed,'''' says Vishwanathan. The company would be adding 1,740 heads this fiscal for the BFSI vertical. Currently the company has 3,200 people working in the BFSI projects with 1,200 from abroad.

Meanwhile, the new BFSI centre has already started inducting manpower mainly for the newly won order. In the last 6-8 weeks 1,200 people have been added. "A total of 1,800 employees will be deployed in the project," Viswanathan said. According to him the company would hire 8,000 employees for the Chennai operations.

The new centre 2-lakh square feet BFSI centre is equipped with state-of-art infrastructure and facilities including self-contained secure client-specific modules, demostration labs, certification test centres, domain training centres and visioning centre, besides health and recreational facilities. Built at an outlay of Rs8.5 crore the centre hosts over 200 projects from 25 clients.

Speaking about the test centres, Viswanathan said that an automatic teller machine (ATM) test lab has been set up at an outlay of Rs1.5 crore. "Here we will test the new ATM applications and which would be later deployed in the other ATMs of our client."