Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) The first question comes from Mark Marcon – Robert W. Baird & Co.
Mark Marcon – Robert W. Baird & Co.
I’m curious about what are you hearing from your clients over the last several weeks? Clearly the economic environment has gotten a lot choppier just in the last few weeks. Are you hearing any signs from any of your clients about potentially cutting back and have you been impacted at all the last few weeks by all of the various transactions we have seen in the financial services area?
Thomas Christopoul
It is always gratifying to see that management focus yields the results you expect it to. We will obviously have to give you some qualitative commentary here with respect to what we are seeing and hearing from our clients but it is a great question and it is obviously something we spend a lot of time working with them on and listening to them about. I don’t need to emphasize in any way for anyone on this call the amount of uncertainty that the global market is feeling and certainly the financial services sector is feeling. I’ll make my comments, I think in a few buckets.
First, in financial services what we are hearing from clients is they are not sure what is going to happen in the short-term. On the positive side we haven’t had any cancellations of projects from any clients. We haven’t had any need to lay off or reducing our staffing of our consultants on projects we have been working on with these clients. On the other hand it would be impossible not to describe their circumstances as in the best case uncertain and in the worst case dire.
Here is what we heard from them. They obviously have very little visibility into what kind of work they are going to be doing and whether that work is going to be focused on being integrated into another institution, being consolidated into another platform or being spun off as another separate perhaps entity where they may be a division today. Here is what they have said to us though and this is actually relatively real-time. We have heard this over the last 14 days from more than a handful of clients that we serve in insurance and banking and financial services. They have said they absolutely expect for there to be work for us to do and to please stand by. So we have actually gotten those in-bound calls on the expectation there is going to be presumably a lot of job and position displacement at these companies and presumably there will be lots of consolidation work and integration work to do in the financial area and in the systems area specifically.
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