Everyone wants to hire our well-trained staff: Karen McLoughlin, Cognizant

On Monday, Cognizant forecast a weak first quarter revenue guidance, citing lower spending from top banking and healthcare customers. In a post-earnings interview, long-time finance chief Karen McLoughlin explained to ET's Anirban Sen Cognizant's weakest first-quarter guidance in years, the employee retention measures that Cognizant is taking and the overall pricing environment. Edited excerpts:

The weak Q1 guidance comes as a surprise, given your strong recent performance - what are some of the challenges you are facing right now?

As Frank mentioned during the (investor) call, we are seeing some pullback from our large banking customers. And we are also facing some headwinds in healthcare.

Is the pullback happening all across the banking & financial services vertical?

At this point, it's been confined to the very large financial institutions, the large banking clients -both European and North America-headquartered clients. It is not pervasive throughout the entire practice. But certainly with the larger clients that are being impacted by the global economy, we are seeing more caution.

Your attrition rates have been high and remain an area of concern. What steps are you taking to curb that?

A few things: one, our bonus accruals in 2015 are significantly higher than they were in 2014, reflecting the strong performance we had last year. On one hand, attrition is higher than we'd like it to be.

On the other hand, because we've done such a good job developing our people, competitors are seeking them. So in some ways that's a compliment.