Chennai: Over a year back, Kris Canekeratne struck a deal with Arun Jain, founder, Polaris to take over his company with a view to synergise his company Virtusa's tech strength with Polaris' banking expertise. As the integration efforts come to a close, Canekeratne talks to TOI about the progress the joint entity has made, the changes that the IT industry is going through and automation. Excerpts:

Citibank has been one of your largest accounts. How has the relationship progressed since the integration announcement.

When we did the Polaris integration, we had guided to a spend reduction for Citibank. Since then, we have seen good momentum with Citibank. While addressing spend reduction goals, we have also built a much stronger relationship. Citigroup has also seen the benefits of the combined entity, VirtusaPolaris.

The IT industry is facing headwind, not just from macro-economic factors. Can you give some perspective?

There is an evolution taking place in IT services, primarily because of the changes clients are going through as a result of 4th industrial revolution. There are multiple forces at work. Advanced technologies like cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and blockchain may have been around but have now reached a point where startups or companies are using them to disrupt the industry. We are also dealing with a much larger percentage of millennials within and outside of our organisations. Digital natives are driving a behavioural shift and everybody else is only a digital immigrant. We can live with and without digital technologies but natives need an advanced user experience. Over the last three years, over $50 billion has been invested towards fin-tech. Significant investment has been pumped into areas like fin-tech, insure-tech, health tech and media tech. What is interesting to note is that none of these factors are based on pure cost arbitrage. For an industry that has largely been built around this cost arbitrage, change is inevitable. Hence, while we are happy, there is significant work to be done

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'We employ insane levels of automation' Kris Canekeratne - Times of India