Quick note before we start: this was written by Ryz Labs, and we're one of the options below. We're biased, so we've been straight about where others beat us.
EPAM Systems is an S&P 500 engineering and consulting firm with about 62,850 people and $5.46B in FY2025 revenue. Financial services is its largest vertical, at 24.1% of revenue. For AI, it sells the AI/Run suite (including blueprints for AI-native delivery teams) and DIAL, its open-source orchestration platform. People look at alternatives for structural reasons. The engagement floor is high: Clutch lists a $100,000+ minimum project, and enterprise program structures can be heavy for one stalled pilot. Delivery is weighted toward India and Central/Eastern Europe, so overlap with New York hours depends on the team. And EPAM's public financial-services AI case studies are mostly anonymized. For broad, multi-year programs, though, EPAM is one of the strongest choices there is.
If you want senior engineers who build AI inside your cloud and ship it to production, start with us. Fortune 500 engineering teams trust us, and only the top 1% of engineers make it through our vetting. Our AI pod teams are dedicated groups of senior engineers (often around seven: a tech lead, an ML engineer, backend engineers) who work in your repos, CI and standups as one team in your time zone, with weekly demos. We work in AWS, Azure, GitHub and Postgres, with Anthropic and OpenAI models. The process is simple: talk, match a team scoped to your stack, embed, then grow the pod or hand the whole system over to your team.
Our pods have shipped production systems, including marketing compliance review for a global capital management firm (8,000+ documents, review time cut from days to hours) and fraud detection for a global fleet company ($5.94M in fraud confirmed by the client's own fraud team). See our case studies. Where we're not the right fit: if you want a management-consulting engagement, a board-level transformation program or a proprietary AI platform like DIAL, EPAM or a large consultancy is the better buy. The same goes if you need engineers in Europe or Asia time zones, or follow-the-sun coverage. Compare us directly at Ryz Labs vs EPAM.
Globant is the closest peer to EPAM in size and disclosure: NYSE-listed, 28,773 employees at the end of 2025. Its "AI Pods" are a monthly subscription with token-metered capacity, where agents do the work under Globant expert supervision. It also runs a Financial Services AI Studio. A bigger Latin American base gives it better US-hours overlap than EPAM's mix. The catch: AI Pods are young ($20.6M ARR in FY2025), and you're buying supervised agent output rather than a named team.
Thoughtworks has three decades of engineering-led consulting and two 2026 platforms: AI/works for agentic development and modernization, and Agent/works, a control plane for running agents in production. It has a public, quantified modernization case: a global lender moved from a monolith to microservices, and Thoughtworks says the new lending line reached $800M in revenue within 24 months. The catch: that's modernization, not AI, and the platforms are new.
If EPAM feels big and you want even bigger, Accenture launched an Accenture Anthropic Business Group with about 30,000 professionals trained on Claude, including "reinvention deployed engineers" who embed Claude in client environments, and playbooks for regulated industries such as financial services. The catch: it's a strategy-and-transformation firm at heart, which suits board-level programs better than a single build.
Endava is NYSE-listed and, like EPAM, has a deep financial-services focus, with a dedicated payments practice. They claim "90% of largest payment companies count on us." It delivers nearshore from Latin America and Eastern Europe. The catch: it's a general engineering firm, so ask how much dedicated AI build experience your team would bring.
Stay if you're running a broad, multi-year engineering and AI program and want one vendor across the whole lifecycle. EPAM has about 56,600 delivery professionals, so it can staff many workstreams at once. Stay if financial-services depth is the deciding factor: it earned about $1.3B from financial services in 2025, more than any other firm on this page. Stay if you want its accelerators, such as DIAL 3.0 with agentic workflows, or its joint AWS financial-services modernization offering. And EPAM's clients tend to stay: 64.4% of 2025 revenue came from clients of five years or more. If your relationship is working, that's a good sign.
Consider moving if you have one stalled AI pilot that doesn't justify a program-sized engagement, or if you need your team on New York hours. Our guide to partners to take an AI pilot to production covers that situation.
Yes. We run dedicated AI pod teams that ship AI systems to production inside your cloud, and Tribe AI uses forward-deployed squads from a senior AI network. Both suit scoped builds better than open-ended programs. See our guide to alternatives to big consultancies for building AI.
Among large firms, Endava (payments) and Thoughtworks (a public lending modernization case) stand out. EPAM itself has the largest financial-services revenue here.
Partly. It has about 2,950 people in Mexico, but its largest delivery locations are India, Ukraine, Poland and Belarus. Ask where your specific team will sit.
None publishes rates. Globant uses a usage-based subscription, and the others quote per engagement. We quote per team, scoped to the work.
Everything here was checked against each company's own site and public sources in October 2026. Vendors change terms often, so confirm before you sign.