BENGALURU: A US jury has asked TCS to pay $210 million for misappropriation of US IT services firm DXC’s (formerly CSC) source code to develop its software platform, TCS Bancs, that would compete with the latter.
The US jury said TCS accessed a trade secret by infringing CSC’s proprietary platforms. The latest award appears to be another setback to TCS after the US Supreme Court confirmed a punitive damages award of $140 million in the Epic Systems case for accessing its web portal without authorisation.
When TOI reached out to TCS on the DXC case, the company said, “TCS respectfully disagrees with the jury’s advisory verdict. The matter will now be decided by the Court, which has ordered further briefing from the parties. We plan to continue to litigate this ongoing case. We will have no further comment as the case remains pending.”
VantageOne and DXC Wealth Management Accelerator enable insurance functions including managing policies and creating new products. Its other platform Cyberlife provides real-time system support for life and annuity products to its client Money Services Inc (MSI), an affiliate of US-based insurer Transamerica.
In 2018, TCS bagged a $2.5-billion deal from Transamerica to enhance its digital capabilities and simplify the service of more than 10 million policies into a single integrated platform. However, in June this year, Transamerica scrapped a $2 billion, 10-year deal with TCS citing the challenging macroeconomic conditions.
The DXC lawsuit in 2019 alleged that most of the former Transamerica/ MSI employees who were employed by TCS had been administering and processing policies at Transamerica / MSI using CSC software.
It said TCS has experienced difficulties in developing its Bancs software platform for the United States and when the lawsuit was filed in 2019, it had estimated that it would take 5-7 years to complete development.
The lawsuit alleged that TCS employees assigned to developing its Bancs platform encountered difficulties devising a software solution for calculating a rate of return (ROR) in a particular insurance context. The lawsuit cited emails exchanged between TCS employees to allege that they found the necessary solution in the Vantage software. Later, a TCS employee allegedly copied and pasted the actual Vantage source code pertaining to this calculation, and resulting Vantage calculations, into an email and sent it to his TCS colleagues.
The lawsuit said one TCS employee wrote in an email, “Here is some text from the old Vantage manuals on the rate of return screen for reference if it answers any questions.” He then pasted nearly two pages from a Vantage manual describing how CSC determined “Calculated Investment Return on Annuities.”
This same TCS employee also looked at the “transactions of interest” that are accessed by the Vantage source code in performing the calculation and sent it to other TCS employees in an email. Another TCS employee circulated additional CSC proprietary information regarding the way that Vantage performs this calculation. Later, this same TCS employee copied and pasted the actual Vantage source code pertaining to this calculation, and resulting Vantage calculations, into an email and sent it to his TCS colleagues.
