Aviva signs 15-year contract with Indian IT giant

Tata Consultancy Services continues to make large gains in the UK life insurance and pensions sector

Karl Flinders,
Chief reporter and senior editor EMEA

Published: 31 Jan 2024 14:45

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will provide technology services to over five million pension policies over the next 15 years, after life insurance and pensions giant Aviva contracted the IT services giant to support its UK business.

The Indian IT services giant’s UK-regulated subsidiary, Diligenta, which specialises in the provision of business process outsourcing services for the UK life and pensions industry, will manage the technology-led contract, which will be underpinned by TCS’s own software-as-a-service (SaaS) core banking platform, known as BaNCS.

The supplier and Aviva, which manages about £358bn in assets, have had a 20-year relationship that has seen an IT transformation to digitise and simplify customer experiences.

Doug Brown, CEO of insurance, wealth and retirement at Aviva, said the contract extension will further simplify operations and support growth ambitions.

“It will allow us to rationalise our systems and improve efficiency, bringing significant benefits for our customers and the business.”

IT outsourcing specialist lawyer Mark Lewis, senior consultant at Stephenson Harwood, said TCS’s UK-regulated BPO service aimed at the life and pensions sector, as well as its BaNCS platform, make it an attractive option for reluctant compliance teams when the business wants to outsource.

“The challenge all grown-up financial services companies have is legacy systems and how they transform,” he said. “The unusually long contract terms say a lot about the relationship between the two companies.”

Pearl Group acquisition

TCS boosted its UK operation though the acquisition of life and pension outsourcing business from Pearl Group in 2005. It then set up Diligenta to help it grow in life and pensions BPO.

It has won significant contracts in the sector in the past eight months. In June last year, the National Employment Savings Trust extended its outsourcing contract with the supplier for another decade.

Worth a reported £840m over the 10-year period, the deal focuses on improving the digital experience for Nest’s 12 million members and one million employers, using TCS’s BaNCS platform.

The same month, the Department for Education outsourced the management of over two million teachers’ pensions to the company, also a 10-year contract aimed at digitally transforming scheme administration. TCS won the contract from Capita, which had run the service for over 20 years.

TCS, which had revenues of about $28bn in its latest financial year, is the biggest of a group of India-based IT services companies.