IT services company Mphasis’ Sparkle Innovation Program has emerged as a significant channel for enterprise-focused innovation, helping it accelerate solution development, strengthen its AI-led portfolio, and support clients across banking, insurance, healthcare, logistics, and other sectors.
Launched in 2016, the initiative aims to foster innovation by partnering with startups, academic bodies and research entities. Over the years, Mphasis has partnered with ventures across sectors, including fintech Upswot to cater to US-based regional and global banks, as well as the Museum of Art & Photography through its CSR arm.
In an email interaction with AIM, Srikumar Ramanathan, chief solutions officer at Mphasis, said the programme is delivering measurable business outcomes and is set to expand further over the next two years.
Ramanathan said Sparkle has shortened evaluation cycles, reduced operational costs and increased pipeline velocity by enabling differentiated co-innovated offerings. He noted that several Sparkle-led engagements have matured into multi-year contracts across industries, including banking, insurance, healthcare, and supply chain.
The programme, he said, has helped clients adopt AI-driven, cloud-native and digital transformation initiatives more rapidly, creating new revenue streams, improving efficiency and enhancing competitiveness.
Through the program, Mphasis has been actively collaborating with Nasscom’s InnoTrek participants, particularly US-based startups, by offering mentorship, enterprise solution guidance, and customer access.
InnoTrek aims to help selected startups achieve global visibility and scale by supplying the necessary knowledge, tools, and connections.
In the 2025 edition of the programme, Mphasis recently partnered with five standout startups from the InnoTrek cohort—Edgeable AI, Perpetuuiti Technosoft, QuoQo, and SuperBryn AI—helping them refine their offerings and connect with enterprise clients worldwide.
The company said it will be working closely with these startups to co-create enterprise-grade solutions by providing technical mentorship, refining their go-to-market strategies, and facilitating access to global enterprise clients.
PoCs to Full-Scale Production
The CSO said a significant number of proofs-of-concept have moved into full-scale production deployments.
These span digital banking back-office automation, data intelligence, fraud detection, workflow digitisation, underwriting and claims-processing automation in insurance, patient data analytics and digital workflows in healthcare, as well as process automation and supply-chain visibility solutions in logistics and manufacturing.
He added that Sparkle also supports cybersecurity and IT resilience use cases, including threat detection, risk monitoring, and compliance automation.
Across sectors, Mphasis’ co-innovated solutions have delivered quantifiable results, Ramanathan asserted.
In insurance, cognitive and automation platforms improved underwriting and claims turnaround while lowering manual processing costs. In banking, AI-enabled automation reduced dependency on legacy systems and improved onboarding and service efficiency.
Healthcare clients, he said, saw better patient data management and more efficient care coordination. Logistics and supply-chain firms benefited from modernisation and productivity improvements, while cybersecurity clients improved their security posture and remediation cycles.
“Across these examples, clients saw faster deployment, improved efficiency, reduced manual effort, and better scalability,” he noted.
In Q2 FY26, the company reported new deal wins (TCV) worth $528 million, with 87% coming from new-gen services such as cloud, AI, and digital engineering. During the quarter, it scored six large deals, including one contract over $100 million with a BFSI client and two above $50 million, underscoring sustained enterprise-level demand.
This followed a strong Q1 FY26, where Mphasis logged $760 million in TCV wins, its highest quarterly figure in recent times.
Ramanathan said Sparkle acts as a feeder into the company’s AI-led, platform-driven portfolio.
By validating partner technologies in sandboxed environments and integrating them into Mphasis’ Front2Back architecture and X2C² framework for quick cloud adoption and cognitive transformation, the company has expanded its AI services more rapidly.
This includes document intelligence, voice AI, cognitive automation, and predictive analytics.
He said time from concept to deployment has “shrunk significantly,” enabling capabilities such as digital underwriting, cloud-native banking workflows, healthcare data platforms and supply-chain automation to reach production faster.
Selection Process
Mphasis selects partners based on alignment with client pain points, technical maturity, enterprise readiness, and integration capability. The CSO said scalability, cloud-native design, compliance standards and complementarity with Mphasis’ frameworks are essential criteria.
Once selected, technologies undergo technical due diligence, sandbox prototyping, use-case mapping and hardening before being integrated into Mphasis’ reference architectures and deployed with enterprise-grade support and SLAs.
Scaling innovations globally comes with challenges such as regulatory differences, legacy system complexity, performance scale-up, and security and compliance requirements. Mphasis addresses these through early compliance assessments, standardisation via its architectures, stress-testing, and leveraging the company’s global delivery footprint and domain-specific Centres of Excellence (CoE), Ramanathan said.
Sparkle differentiates itself by being “client problem–first” and embedding co-innovated solutions directly into enterprise delivery pipelines through Front2Back and X2C², he added.
He said the model is outcome-driven and enables future-ready, cloud-native, AI-led and compliance-focused modernisation for clients.
Ramanathan claimed the company is seeing strong enterprise traction in AI-led automation, cloud-native modernisation, cybersecurity and compliance automation, voice AI, and supply-chain and logistics automation. These areas reflect rising demand for resilience, scalability and better customer experience, particularly in regulated sectors.
Evaluating the programme, he said Sparkle has matured into a “dependable innovation channel” that bridges emerging technologies with real business needs.
Over the next 12–24 months, Mphasis expects to scale more PoCs to global production, deepen investments in AI-native and cloud-native platforms, expand domain-specific blueprints, strengthen global delivery CoEs, and support growing demand for integrated AI, automation, cloud and cybersecurity solutions.
“Sparkle is evolving into a robust, enterprise-ready, multi-industry innovation ecosystem that supports clients’ digital transformation journeys end-to-end,” he signed off.
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