Tata Consultancy Services in Hiawatha is laying off 23 employees in Hiawatha as part of a plan to close the company’s Hiawatha location, according to a notice on the state of Iowa’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) site.
The layoffs will be effective Oct. 3, according to the Iowa WARN notice.
The company previously laid off approximately 40 employees in the Cedar Rapids area in December 2019.
Tata, with operations at 929 Marthas Way in Hiawatha, is a professional, scientific and technical services firm with more than 600,000 employees in 55 countries.
In 2023, Tata and Transamerica mutually agreed to end their partnership in Cedar Rapids. Under that partnership, launched in January 2018, Tata signed a $2 billion deal for a multi-year partnership to serve as third-party administrator for the insurance and annuity business lines of Transamerica’s U.S. operations in Cedar Rapids and other U.S. locations – the largest contract in TCS history at that time.
In the process, Tata became one of the Corridor’s largest private employers at that time.
According to terms of the 2018 deal, TCS offered employment to 882 Transamerica employees and leased two buildings at Transamerica’s north campus at the intersection of 42nd Street and Edgewood Road NE.
The plan to end the partnership in 2023 was announced in an email sent recently to Transamerica employees and confirmed in a joint statement from Transamerica and TCS.
“Considering the current macro environment and respective business priorities, Transamerica and Tata Consultancy Services have mutually agreed to end the administration arrangement for Transamerica life insurance, annuities, and supplemental health insurance and other employee benefit products,” the statement said. “Transamerica and TCS will work together to ensure a smooth transition of the administration of these products to a new servicing model, which we expect to take approximately 30 months.”
According to the email sent to Transamerica employees, as part of the aftermath of the decision to end the partnership, “we plan to add approximately 700 full-time positions, with an emphasis on hiring in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.”
In the email, titled “Revitalizing our strategic assets and operating model,” Transamerica officials described the decision to end the company’s agreement with TCS as “essential to enabling our growth strategy and restoring Transamerica’s reputation as a market-leading, customer-focused company.”
