BBC outsources IT to India’s Tata Consultancy Services

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has added another UK public sector organisation to its customer list, with a deal to provide finance accounting and payroll services to the BBC.

This comes hot on the heels of other key wins in the sector.

The Indian IT supplier will apply artificial intelligence, machine learning and intelligent automation through its Cognix platform of pre-built cloud-based modules and manage the applications supporting the business functions.

The BBC did not comment on the contract, which Computer Weekly believes from tender notices replaces IBM and could be worth up to £170m over 11 years.

Amit Kapur, UK country head at TCS, said the deal will transform the BBC’s finance and payroll function.

“TCS’s digital capabilities and domain expertise will help them achieve their business objectives while building greater agility and resilience in their operations,” he said. “This partnership will strengthen TCS’s position as a leader in delivering transformative business services to the media and entertainment industry.”

It will also strengthen the supplier’s growing UK public sector business.

Last month, TCS penned a deal with the National Employment Savings Trust to extend its outsourcing for another decade, worth a reported £840m. It has been a TCS customer since 2011, when the auto-enrolment pension scheme was first launched by the UK government. TCS took responsibility for end-to-end administration services across the scheme, building a greenfield operation with a user-friendly, multi-channel, self-service model.

The same month, TCS announced another big win in the public sector, when the Department for Education awarded it a contract to manage more than two million teachers’ pensions in a 10-year deal that includes digital transformation. It won the contract from Capita, which had run the service for more than 20 years.

After announcing a deal with the UK’s Financial Ombudsman Service last year, UK head Kapur said it “strengthened our collaboration in the UK public sector financial services”.

The sector has been difficult to break for Indian IT services firms – despite them being huge players in the UK private sector – but TCS has begun to build a good public sector customer base in the UK.

According to Tussell, which analyses government spending data, TCS made just under £31m in sales to the UK public sector in 2017, and this figure increased to £52m by 2019, before the pandemic slowed things down. There is huge potential for growth in the UK public sector for TCS and other Indian services firms.

TCS is a part of the Tata Group, which has just announced plans to build a gigafactory for batteries in the UK. The £4bn investment will create up to 4,000 new direct jobs, and is expected to create thousands more in the wider supply chain.