SOFIA TIMES

In This Issue

Market Update

Placement Section

Banking and Financial

Services

International Outlook

Regulators Join Hands

16th November 2014

Oil falls below $79, lowest in 4 years The price of Brent crude oil fell to the lowest in 4 years, below $80 per barrel. The data from the Chinese economy showed a slowdown in activity last month and Saudi Arabia gave no signs about a possible cut in production. The Chinese economy is slipping, with factory growth dipping and investment growth hitting a record 13 year low which further aggra-vated worries about a slower increase in fuel demand. Brent crude for December, expiring on Thursday, was down by $1.51 at 78.87 a barrel. US light crude was down 40 cents at $76.68 a barrel. According to the Organization of the Petro-leum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the demand for Oil will fall to 29.2 million barrels per day (bpd) by next year, which is almost 1 million bpd less than the current output. OPEC members will meet in Vienna on November 27 to discuss how to respond to the 30

percent fall in oil prices over the past 5 months. Qatar will lower oil output to about 5,

00,000 bpd by the end of November from 6, 50,000 bpd at the end of October and from 8,

00,000 a month before that. Saudi Arabia has refused to back any cut in output which shows

that it is more concerned about maintaining its market share than supporting prices. US

crude stocks fell by 1.5 million barrels to 373 million last week, data from the American Pe-

troleum Institute showed. Analysts had expected an 8, 00,000 barrel increase.

Market Update

Market Update The BSE Sensex rose by 4.64% and the NIFTY closed higher by 4.49% for the month of Oc-tober 2014. The HSBC Services Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) rose to 51.6 in September from 50.6 in August reflecting the growth in services activity which gathered pace in September as order books filled up faster. On the other hand, the HSBC India Purchasing Managers’ In-dex (PMI), which tracks growth in manufacturing activities dropped from 52.4 in August to 51.0 in September reflecting that growth in manufacturing activities slowed to a nine-month low. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) kept key rates unchanged in the fourth bi-monthly mone-tary policy. It kept repo rate under the liquidity adjustment facility (LAF) unchanged at 8% and the Cash reserve ratio (CRR) of scheduled banks unchanged at 4% of net demand and time liabilities (NDTL). Industrial growth fell to the lowest this financial year at 0.4 percent over a year earlier from a 0.5 percent in July. Manufacturing output, which accounts for 75% of industrial output, shrunk 1.4 % from a year earlier in August. India’s Wholesale Price Index (WPI) – based inflation fell to a 59 month low of 2.38% in September 2014 from 3.74% in August 2014. India’s trade deficit narrowed to $10.8 billion in August from $12.2 billion in July as the price of crude oil fell. A fall in the price of crude oil helps reduce our import bills. The Consumer price index-based inflation came down to 6.46% in September as compared to a corresponding figure 0f 9.84% in the same month last year. The Government on its part promised to open up the coal industry to private players and

moved one step closer to selling a stake in Oil and Natural gas Corp (ONGC). On 29th Oc-

tober 2014, the Union Cabinet announced a relaxation of rules for foreign investment in

property development and construction.

Market Update

COGNIZANT

Cognizant Acquires Australian Digital Solutions Firm Odecee

Making its fourth buy in the year, Nasdaq listed Cognizant has acquired Australian digi-tal solutions provider, Odecee. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed. The acquisition gets intellectual property such as Velocedee, a platform that helps central-ize highly secure mobile applications and enables rapid implementation of core business processes across a wide range of mobile devices under Cognizant’s banner. Also the 150 men strong team with expertise across enterprise mobile, web and cloud ser-vices will join cognizant. The seven year old firm founded by Michael Bodle, Oscar Huseyin and Con Mouzouris provides enterprise mobility, web and cloud solutions to companies in the financial services, insurance, healthcare, logistics, and communications industries. @CognizantTechSolutions which provides information technology, consulting, and busi-ness process outsourcing services across diverse sectors has acquired 22 companies since its inception in 1994. Its most recent buys: Cadient Group for about $30 Mn TriZetto Corp. for $2.7 billion Itaas Inc. for an undisclosed amount With SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) technologies getting close to $500 Mn of revenues, the company seeks to further strengthen its foothold in the space expanding its

Placement Section Recent News about Placement Companies

Cognizant pips Infy, Wipro in revenue growth

Cognizant Technology Solutions has reported an 11 per cent increase in net profit, at $356 million, in the third quarter ended September 30, against $320 million in the same quarter last year. Revenue was at $2.6 billion, up 12 per cent from the year-ago period and 2.5 per cent sequentially. The company said it had seen “significant” traction for its social, mobile, analytics and cloud offerings with clients.US-based Cognizant, which has over 75 per cent of its em-ployees working in India, added nearly 12,300 people in the September quarter, according to a company press release. During the quarter, Cognizant was behind Tata Consultancy Services in revenue growth but beat Infosys and Wipro. The Company expects to end the full-year with revenue be-tween $10.13 billion and $10.16 billion.

TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

TCS profit up 4.5% to Rs. 5244 crore, to merge CMC with itself TCS reported consolidated net profit rising 4.55 percent sequentially to Rs 5,288 crore in the quarter ended September 2014. Profit in the previous quarter was Rs 5,057.8 crore. Consolidated revenue grew by 7.7 percent to Rs 23,816 crore in July-September quarter compared to Rs 22,111 crore in previous quarter while dollar revenue growth was 6.4 per-cent at USD 3,929 million compared to USD 3,694 million on sequential basis driven by strong volume growth. TCS added four USD 50 million plus clients and nine USD 20 million plus clients in the quarter gone by. The utilisation rate (excluding trainees) was at 86.2 percent while that in-cluding trainees was 81.3 percent during the quarter. The attrition rate (last twelve months) was 12.8 percent at the end of the quarter.

Placement Section Recent News about Placement Companies

Accenture

Accenture Enhances Cloud Migration and Management via AWS Cloud Alliance

Accenture announced that it is extending its cloud computing alliance with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to include an Accenture Enterprise Application Migration Service for the AWS Cloud. The company will be providing tighter integration between the self-service cloud management framework that Accenture created and AWS management tools. In addition, Accenture announced that it is building an Accenture Centre of Excellence for AWS Cloud in Seattle where customers can work with consultants to move large-scale ap-plications into the cloud. Thus far, Accenture claims to have worked on more than 8,000 cloud computing projects for clients, including nearly 75 percent of the Fortune Global 100, and has more than 14,000 professionals trained in cloud computing.

New Accenture Insurance Agent Effectiveness Solution, Developed on Salesforce, Helps Insurers Increase Sales Effectiveness

Accenture unveiled the Accenture Insurance Agent Effectiveness Solution, an innova-tive cloud-based application designed to help insurance field sales organizations in their efforts to prospect and recruit agencies, agents and brokers and to improve the perfor-mance of this critical distribution channel. Built on the Salesforce1 Platform, the Accen-ture Insurance Agent Effectiveness Solution provides sales leaders with visibility into the end-to-end agency performance cycle, from the establishment of agency and territory sales goals to tracking production results and developing individualized action plans to improve agent performance.

The new solution provides reporting and dashboards to help sales leaders proactively an-alyse market opportunities and identify strategies to expand customer relationships. The Accenture Insurance Agent Effectiveness Solution is a flexible, modular application that supports the agency performance cycle including sales planning, recruiting, relationship management, sales execution and performance management. The platform is designed for insurance carriers that distribute through exclusive and/or independent insurance agen-cies and brokers. It can be implemented quickly and cost-effectively through the use of Accenture’s proven tools and supporting methodology.

Placement Section Recent News about Placement Companies

Accenture building Mobile governance platform for Andhra Pradesh Accenture Plc is building mobile platforms and a website for 21 government services of the Arunachal Pradesh government. Called Arunachal m-Seva, the mobile government system, when completed, will give citizens access to government services ranging from safety and health alerts to employment services and pension benefits, Accenture said in a statement on Monday. The services of eight state departments will be available on mar-ketplaces such as Google Inc’s Play, Microsoft Corp’s Windows Phone Store, Apple Inc’s iPhone App Store and Nokia Oyj’s Nokia Store. Emergency, safety and health alerts will also be shared by text messages (SMS). The contract, worth $70,000, also requires Accen-ture to develop a web-based portal for the health, police, tourism, disaster management, agriculture, land management, social welfare and employment departments.

ECLERX eClerx Launches Know Your Customer Solution eClerx on 9th October 2014 announced it has launched its proprietary Know Your Custom-er (KYC) solution. Offered in a three tier system, enabling banks to have access to the best offering based on the immediate and strategic requirements, the KYC platform enables both sell side and buy side clients to quickly establish and effectively conduct KYC pro-cesses and satisfy these rules through a highly controlled and supervised operations plat-form, reducing regulatory risk and ensuring compliance across multiple jurisdictions. The eClerx KYC solution addresses key compliance requirements of the major regulatory bodies, both US and International, including the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comp-troller of the Currency (OCC) in the United States, which require customer identification, due diligence and record keeping for the purposes of preventing identity theft, fraud, money laundering and terrorist financing. Additional features in the product include: Risk level and anti-money laundering (AML) classification. Validation of core customer attributes, including officials, on a periodic basis. Archival evidence of any changes, and the performance of negative news checks on

companies and its officials. Ability to both cross reference entities and jurisdictions against politically exposed per-

sons (PEP) and blacklisted individuals, and works with banks to adapt policies per cli-ent type, jurisdiction and AML classification.

Assured quality assurance levels with variable, per entity pricing, and established pro-cesses for leveraging hundreds of public and paid data sources.

Placement Section Recent News about Important Companies

United Spirits Diageo bars United Breweries from appointing independent director at United Spir-its Diageo on 2nd October 2014 said India's United Breweries Holdings Ltd can no longer appoint an independent director to the board of United Spirits Ltd (USL) after reducing its ownership of the South Asian distillery. Diageo nearly doubled its stake in USL following a $1.9 billion bid earlier this year, giv-

ing it the right to appoint the majority of directors to USL's board.

The London-listed beverage said that Vijay Mallya, who controls United Breweries, will

continue to serve as non-executive director and chairman of USL for as long as United

Breweries owns at least 1.3 million USL shares. Mallya previously controlled USL

through United Breweries, but he had to lower his stake because of heavy debt brought

about by the collapse of his Kingfisher Airlines Ltd.

FACTSET

Xignite Partners with FactSet

Xignite, Inc., the leading provider of cloud-based financial market data, on 14th October 2014 announced a partnership with industry-leading data provider FactSet to integrate FactSet’s global fundamental data (including company financials and estimates) into the Xignite Market Data Cloud platform. Through this partnership, Xignite will now offer a comprehensive global view that is unique within the financial market data cloud indus-try.

This agreement with FactSet will build on Xignite’s existing catalog of market data APIs to provide clients with an even wider selection of data points, including historical finan-cials, company fundamentals, earnings, revenue and dividend estimates, as well as earn-ings calendars. With the addition of the high-quality and timely data from the FactSet Fundamentals database, Xignite clients will benefit from complete global coverage en-compassing all major markets and covering more than 75,000 publicly listed companies.

Placement Section Recent News about Important Companies

Geographic Revenue Exposure Data Now Available in FactSet Portfolio Analytics

Factset today announced the release of the FactSet Geographic Revenue Exposure (GeoRevs) data within the FactSet Portfolio Analytics product to give investors a better way to uncover risk and fine-tune exposures. Investment managers increasingly recognize that a firm's country of domicile can too often be an inaccurate reflection of geographic exposure. The addition of GeoRevs in FactSet Portfolio Analytics highlights where the companies in their portfolios derive revenue, both on an absolute basis and relative to a benchmark. With FactSet GeoRevs in Portfolio Analytics, active managers can construct developed market portfolios to gain exposure to emerging markets. Risk managers are able to quickly identify and avoid companies whose revenues are too dependent upon countries exposed to geopo-litical risks, a natural disaster, or a health epidemic.

BANKING SECTOR

RBI announces stringent norms for ATM users: As per the new guidelines given by the RBI more than five transactions a month at home bank ATMs will attract penalty of 20 Rs. Each. The users are not happy with the guide lines as free transactions includes change of PIN and request for mini statements as well.

As per the RBI the move was to promote the use of virtual currency and demotivate people from using currency notes.

India Post plans to become a universal bank: Indian Post showed interest to turn itself into a universal bank if the government allows. Actually post office has been accepting deposits and mobilizing savings for last many years therefor it is already working like a payment bank. Hence it was proposed to file an appli-cation for the licence to run activities as a payment bank.

According to the draft RBI guidelines the payment banks can only accept deposits and of-fer payment services but cannot do any lending activities. The applicant for the licence re-quires capital of 50 crore.

BANKING SECTOR

Central Bank of Japan acts to stimulate the economy: In order to reduce deflation the bank bought larger quantities of government debt. The aim was to keep the borrowing cost low, encourage spending and ultimately stoke inflation and growth. The BOJ is pushing hard to keep consumer price inflation to 2% next year.

As result of the stimulus the global markets surged to more than one percent and yen fell to seven year low against dollar.

The biggest winner from Oil price plunge!

The Chinese, among others, seem to be responding to the lower oil price with additional demand.

The plunge in price has enabled China to add 35 million barrels to its inventories in the past three months as the nation fills its strategic petroleum reserves though the oil slide is hurting nations from Venezuela to Iran - that depend on energy for revenues - ship owners serving the industry’s benchmark Middle East-to-Asia trade routes are reaping the best re-turns from charters in yearsas the slump drives down the industry’s single biggest expense

The world’s second biggest economy purchased 25.5 million metric tons a month in the January-to-September period, heading for a record year. Falling prices may add to those figures as winter approaches

A near-record 113 tankers are destined for China.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-15/and-biggest-winner-oil-price-plunge

International Outlook

SEBI helps US regulator bust social media investment scam

Scam named “Profit Paradise” was being run by two Indians from Mumbai and Hydera-bad respectively in the name of “High Yield Investment Product (HYIP)”.

Operating in India they disguised the physical location by providing the false internet da-ta, investors were fooled by being enticed through social media pitches on various social media sites-Facebook, twitter, Google and other social networking sites.

Under this various operators solicit investments in securities, but most of them have turned to be yet another frontier for defrauding gullible investors in name of high and quick returns.

While probing the case, the US markets regulator SEC (Securities and Exchange Commis-sion) sought assistance from its peers in India, Canada and Hong Kong.

Regulators Join Hands

Uber has reportedly launched a wallet-style payment system in India in the wake of recent regulations, according to which all transactions need to pass through do -mestic payment systems Now customers can pay through debit card and net banking in addition to the cred it card option before. Cash payments are not supported , money can be put into prepaid wallet. This system is backed by Paytm, an India based payment platform.

Uber introduces wallet based payment system in India

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