The deal, the person said, is valued at about $500 million and Centene is an existing client of Cognizant. It will be using its Trizetto platform to handle high-volume medical billing, claims adjudication, and customer call centres.
Winning large deals, worth $100 million and above, has been a key priority for CEO Ravi Kumar in this uncertain macroeconomic environment. In 2025, Cognizant won 28 large deals with total contract value (TCV) growth up almost 50 per cent compared to 2024.
In the first quarter, the company won seven large deals and a mega deal, with a contract value of more than $500 million. That was a growth of over 70 per cent in TCV of large deals, compared to a year earlier.
Centene has long been a client of Cognizant. Nasdaq-listed Cognizant signed a deal with HealthNet in 2014 for about $2.7 billion as part of which the IT company was to provide consulting, technology and administrative services in areas such as claims management, membership and benefits configuration, customer contact centre services, information technology, quality assurance, appeals and grievance services, and medical management support.
When Centene bought HealthNet in 2016, the deal was restructured as many part of the deal overlapped with its existing systems. Healthcare segment remains one of the largest business verticals for Cognizant, contributing about 29 per cent to the top line, while financial services contributed 30.4 per cent. The deal is significant as it comes at a time when the US healthcare industry has gone slow on discretionary spending.
Large deals have become the lifeline for IT services companies in the tepid growth environment and these are mostly cost optimisation and vendor consolidation deals. The challenge with such deals is they are often slow to ramp up and take time to materialise. In a demand environment which is already subdued, large deals would also mean fierce competition among IT services players that usually eats into the margins.
In the recent past, however, some of the large players are seeing momentum back in the large-deal segment. Most of these deals are AI-led. HCLTech, earlier this month, announced that it bagged a $1.14 billion deal from a large European firm. This AI-driven deal is for a period of five years, with an option of extending this by another five-years.
During its Q1FY27 results, Tata Consultancy Services announced AI-led $800 million deal from SKF.
— Avik Das, Business Standard