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Indian IT Consultancy TCS is Developing over “100” Blockchain Projects

Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:51 PM
Samburaj Das
Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:51 PM

India’s largest IT services firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is overseeing a number of blockchain pilots and proof of concepts for clients around the world.

The revelation was made by N Chandrasekaran, chief executive at TCS in an interview with Indian business daily The Economic Times . The premise of the interview was addressing the firm’s second quarterly results of 2016, which revealed company revenues at its slowest growth in a decade.

N Chandrasekaran

India’s position as one of the world’s foremost growing economies is significantly aided by its information technology industry that provides and supports IT solutions for industries around the world. Suffice to say, Indian IT giants like TCS are looking to proactively understand and develop the curve, let alone stay ahead of it.

“Twenty years ago, businesses would decide what support they needed from technology. Today, with digital, the business is getting embedded in technology,” the executive stated.

Elaborating on the company adapting to a changing technological landscape, Chandrasekaran picked blockchain technology as the innovation that the financial services industry is most interested about.

He added:

 

Companies are doing this differently, in different pieces. If you take financial services, there is a lot of excitement about blockchain. So, we’re trying to see how we can effectively use blockchain to bring a real-time behavior between (multiple) nodes in a financial process.

 

Chandrasekaran further revealed that TCS has been working on developing distributed ledger solutions for 18 months, alongside “active discussions” with 40 global banks. One of these discussions has already led to a partnership between Dutch bank ABN AMRO and the Indian IT giant, in a blockchain development project for settlement and clearing.

Indeed, the chief executive added:

 

Today, we have many solutions, proof of concepts, pilots…more than 100 such demos.

 

India, arguably the world’s foremost IT services hub, is unsurprisingly seeing an increasing number of offshore and in-house companies and financial firms looking into blockchain technology.

The world’s biggest payments network, VISA, revealed plans to setup a specialist blockchain development center in the city of Bangalore, India’s primary IT hub.

Private non-nationalized banks in the country such as ICICI have notably conducted blockchain-based pilot transactions in cross-border remittance and trade finance, as revealed last week. Within days, two more Indian banks also revealed their blockchain pilot programs in different sectors of industry.

With many observers and enthusiasts heralding blockchain technology as an innovation with transformative potential, Chandrasekaran sees the evolution of technology will mean “it’s just not replacing the old, it’s opening up new possibilities.”

 

He added:

f you ask me two or four quarters away, do you see a blockchain practice producing a billion dollars next year, I can’t answer the question. We are on the forefront.

 

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