The UK’s financial services compensation watchdog has awarded a £40 million contract to overhaul its IT infrastructure to CapGemini.
The contract was first advertised in July 2019, as reported by Computer Business Review. It attracted just two tenders.
The consultancy will be in charge of a five-year project to modernise the FSCS, including helping it “evolve the skills and capabilities of the CIO Function”, reduce total cost of ownership, and shift services to the cloud.
As a contract award notice published on an EU tenders page today reveals that the contract is split into three areas.
These include the “foundation services“:
- Software development lifecycle support
- Hardware and software, and
- Microsoft Azure and Office 365 support.
The “transformation services of
- Cloud assessment, migration and support
And the “future services“:
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- IT service functions,
- Support for finance solutions,
- Infrastructure services,
- Service desk/ITSM tooling.
The FSCS is an independent, industry-funded financial compensation organisation. It anticipates compensation costs will grow strongly over the “next three years, driven primarily by escalating pension claims.”
The contract will help FSCS’ ambition to “exploit the benefits of a cloud-based environment”; replace its main claims technology platforms “as part of our ongoing service transformation” and “embrace… new innovative technologies.”
This move comes after the FSCS announced in May that it had increased its overall levy by a total of £46 million, due in part to the London Capital Finance (LCF) failure that left thousands of investors with no compensation.
Chief executive of the FSCS Caroline Rainbird emphasised the push to improved technology in this year’s plan: “Some of the key challenges the FSCS will face include: an increased choice of financial products, a faster pace of technology change and an ever critical need to keep personal data secure.
“We are seeing many of these challenges starting to really impact upon our customers as well as levy payers”.
