BPM not a low-margin biz: Capgemini CEO

Paris-headquartered information technology services and consulting major Capgemini recently completed one of the largest acquisitions in the business process management (BPM) space — of WNS for $3.3 billion. This marks the firm's fourth acquisition in India. During his visit to the country as the deal closed, Aiman Ezzat, chief executive officer (CEO) of Capgemini, speaks with Shivani Shinde at the company’s Hyderabad campus about the WNS acquisition, why artificial intelligence (AI) is still not delivering meaningful value, and why India continues to see strong hiring momentum. Edited excerpts:

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What was the rationale behind the $3 billion acquisition of BPM firm WNS?

For us, the big showcase will be the complete transformation of end-to-end processes, Take, for instance, the claims process in insurance — transforming that process completely allows us to embed AI, generative AI (GenAI), and agentic AI. But this kind of end-to-end business transformation is complex because you need to define processes at a very granular level. WNS gives us that operational expertise.

We have credibility in driving transformational projects around Cloud and AI, but we also need operational depth. WNS gives us scale and expands our reach into new processes, enabling us to take on large, complex transformation programmes where we assume part of the operations and underwrite the transformation for the client. Many assume BPM margins are low, but that’s not the case — this business delivers healthy margins. More importantly, it’s currently growing the fastest. It’s interesting that a business many thought would eventually fade is, in fact, the one growing the fastest.

What is the scope for cross-selling services within the existing client base after this acquisition?