The Street: Cognizant’s Chief Financial Officer Talks About Cognizant’s Growth and Business Outlook

“We’re very pleased with the way the [March-ended 2013] quarter played out,” says Karen McLoughlin. “We are really seeing strong growth going into Q3. Given the demand environment, we’re seeing now and the rest of year, there is some potential for upside.”

“We saw very good growth among many of our business units,” McLoughlin notes. “We saw some recovery in the banking industry that continued into Q1 and we actually expect that to continue as we go into Q2 and beyond, for the rest of the year. It’s a really nice recovery in our large banking clients as well as tier-two banking clients.”

She adds, “The other area where we saw strength was in Continental Europe. We’ve talked about how in Europe we have begun to see really strong pipeline over the last couple of quarters, customers are talking about changing the way they are doing business in Continental Europe and we’re starting to continue to see an evolution of that.”

Talking about Cognizant’s investments in new services around social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) technologies, McLoughlin says, “We expect the SMAC business to be about $500 million in revenue this year. We launched some of those businesses just recently. What we’ve seen is they’re growing much faster than we expected to. The adoption rate across customers has been terrific.”

She notes that the biggest piece of that business today is analytics. “Cognizant has historically had a very strong analytics practice,” she says. “Elsewhere, we’re doing a number of different things. In mobile, for instance, we’ve developed our own platform TruMobi—it’s to help customers with their ‘bring you own device’ (BYOD) programs.”