THE QUIET SMILE BELIES THE IRON WITHIN. When Ashoke Dutt selected Chennai in 1989 to set up a call center, processing “factory” and headquarters for Citibank’s ambitious consumer lending and credit card plans in India, people thought he was taking on some pretty heavy odds. In those days, not many professionals aspiring to join a multinational marked Chennai out as one of their list of cities to live in. Not even remotely. Yet, in a matter of months hundreds of business and engineering professionals—including many from the IIM’s—moved to this sleepy city to follow the dream. When Dutt went to Madras telephones to ask for a hundred direct telephone lines, the stupefied officials said they couldn’t afford to give more than 10 to any one customer. His vision of the future and the advantages to the city convinced the senior officials to make the 100 lines available. International telecom agencies—their eye on India’s potential—were motivated to quickly create call management platforms similar to that in the U.S. to integrate hundreds of lines in four other metros with those in Chennai, creating a state-of-the-art centralized call handling infrastructure. And India’s first multi-city 24x7x365 consumer platform handling thousands of incoming calls a day was launched.

The Chennai post office was next. The Mount Road post office (one of the city’s largest) was aghast at his request to process his first month’s credit card direct mail campaign of 4 million pieces. The sorting room wasn’t capable of handling that much in a year! The unfazed Dutt called in a couple of Post Master Generals out of retirement, leased out an apartment near the post office, hired a small army to sort out incoming and outgoing mail—the post office had in effect outsourced this operation. Of course, Citibank representatives had to be planted in the major receiving post offices around the country to make sure the large volumes of incoming mail weren’t thrown away.

The list goes on. Soon, a galvanized Chennai (then Madras) drew entrepreneurs ranging from carpenters to fabric suppliers, government agencies from electricity and water supply to law enforcement—all embracing the multinational’s bold expansion plans in the most unlikely of business location choices. The advantages of low costs and outstanding human resources talent were not lost on Dutt. “It was fascinating to watch the transformation of Madras as we executed our growth plans,” says Dutt. “In 1989, the traffic signals in most streets did not switch on before 8:30 a.m. By 1993, peak traffic started by 7 a.m. Thousands of new jobs were being created. It wasn’t long before other banks, car manufacturers and many others followed us in large numbers.”

Looking back, the goals seemed not only audacious, but unrealistic. “But in those days, we were driven by this passion to create something world class in a country where consumers were grateful if they got “okay” products and service from the banking industry. We had to get the job done.” That “job” was establishing Citibank credit cards in India, which under Dutt’s leadership grew to over 50 percent market share. “It was more than owning the market, we built the category itself in an environment where the concept of obtaining credit was quite out of the consumer’s reach,” recalls the now Executive Vice President of Discover Card in the U.S.

Ashoke Dutt grew up in Calcutta and spent a large part of his twenties in the West Bengal capital, following the traditional “safe” education in chemical engineering. “I had the least interest in coming to the U.S., and continued to work as a sales engineer at Chloride U.K.’s India offices,” says Dutt. Four years later, Dutt did come to the U.S. for a master’s degree in engineering, persuaded by the family. “But I was taken in by business dynamics and analytics, and selected subjects in industrial engineering, operations research and business management more than pure engineering,” recalls the Discover executive. Post graduation, Dutt lost no time in finding his way back home. “My circle of friends were surprised; it was rare to see somebody go back home so soon. There were careers to be made here, and I was one guy intent on getting back home.” Coincidentally, Citibank was interviewing on campus.

Dutt interviewed with Citibank and told them he wanted to go back to work in India. Not surprisingly, the request was turned down. Fortunately for Dutt, his student counselor was interested in helping him and called Citibank in New York. The bank prided itself in recruiting a diverse workforce—there were Ph.D’s in Physics and Math who worked in Citibank, and in fact the recruiters showcased a young, rising star in their company who came from a similar operations research background as Dutt did. (The “star” turned out to be John Reed, the future Chairman of Citicorp.) The New York team tried convincing Dutt to work in Saudi Arabia, where Citibank was in need of people. “I felt my country had incredible potential and people like myself could make a big difference if given the chance.” So instead, Dutt went back to India in 1980. And he stayed there for 18 long years.

“Today, I think it has been a wonderful dream that came true. In many cases that I had seen, people returned to the U.S., after a 2- or 3-year stint, giving up on the state of the Indian culture and business environment. But I think the key to my successful 18 years in India was leveraging that very entrepreneurial culture. Entrepreneurial spirit not only survives but succeeds in the most daunting of business environments in India,” says Dutt.

He joined corporate banking (Citibank did not have a consumer bank in India those days), and first took on a marketing role, managing large corporate relationships. Dutt was quite content in his role when a senior advised him to shift back into operations. “It was his opinion that corporate bank marketing was a lonely management job—you, your secretary and your strategies. But operations would give me a wider experience, handling administration, people, business challenges, technologies—that was the best way to train to be a business manager, not a specialist.” Again, this was totally contrary to everyone else’s career choice—nobody wanted to leave the glamour of a marketing job. But the senior was right.

Dutt shifted gears and changed lanes back to operations, as branch manager, northern India, which was in New Delhi. It was his first opportunity to work with technology. Citibank was the first private sector company outside the tech industry to experiment with remote data centers, where Delhi was designated the first remote center, Mumbai being the hub. “There were many union issues with that, and it was also my first taste of managing unions,” recalls Dutt. Citibank was the first private sector business to take leased lines for this large scale data traffic, way back in 1985. It was a pilot for the telecom department as well.

Strategically, this was a phased evolution for Citibank in India. Without branch operations in all the metros, it could leverage technology to establish its presence in any metro it chose. “Branches were no longer the limitation for consumer lending businesses in any city,” says Dutt. The innovation spawned many advantages. “The exercise taught me many things—people management, peer management, being on the cutting edge of technology. One of the lessons I learned was not to be afraid of moving sideways in a career path. Career climbers are frightened to death about this, but if it facilitates reaching the ultimate career goal, a lateral move is at times a great push forward.”

The consumer bank began operations in India. “An interesting partnership experience with consumer lending began with India’s premier car company, Maruti,” recalls Dutt. Maruti’s first production was simply piling up at its Guragaon facilities. People had car delivery reservations, but no money to pay up. Citibank was the first to recognize the opportunity in a strategic finance partnership with Maruti. Within 6 months, the scheme worked wonders and the stockpile shrunk. “There was no credible way to assess a person’s credit history and create a viable financing scheme, though smaller finance companies made small loans on a very regional basis,” says Dutt. To finance cars in these volumes on a national basis required a smart, large-scale implementation program. “It was tough, pioneering work. But it put us on India’s banking map,” Dutt reminisces.

Around the same time, Citibank started the first NRI portfolio in India. “There were these numerous well-to-do Indians all around the world, yearning to retain their links with India, yet there was really no product for them,” recalls Dutt. There was an FCNR scheme and order-takers for it, but nobody really managed the customers. Citibank entered the fray and set up offices all around the world, specifically to cater to the customer-relationship management. Offices sprouted up in Los Angeles, New York, the U.A.E, Australia—the ultimate high networth banking model. “This kind of banking was a part of any bank’s larger business model, but here, at Citibank, we leveraged the power of Indian software technology to enable seamless banking services to these individuals across the world,” says Dutt. For the first time, an NRI from Dubai could walk into a Citibank office in Singapore, and the relationship managers there could pull up the Dubai customer’s portfolio and deliver all the services that the Dubai branch could offer—“the ultimate in customized and personalized service.” This was way back in the 80’s, says Dutt. Even today a New York bank would not be able to transact this seamless process for a customer across states. “I learnt another lesson in this. We think of technology as a support function—a black box into which strange people write some strange code. If it works, it is taken for granted, and if it doesn’t, these people are called failures. But in reality—especially in a high volume, consumer business—technology forms 80 percent of your delivery, which frees up your people to market, sell, give service to customers and grow the business.”

There are two sides to a business; promise and delivery. While the promise is the substance of marketing, packaging and so on, delivery is derived by technology. “The lack of appreciation that most business heads have for the power of technology is surprising,” observes Dutt. The business must have a partnership with technology for it to succeed in helping the business. “The NRI model was a classic consumer banking dream come true,” says Dutt. “There was this large diaspora of high networth individuals spread across the globe, and all transactional processes were run off a remote low cost three-shift hub in Chennai while the customers saw only their local account manager.” When the FCNR incentives were withdrawn by the Indian government, most banks exited the NRI business. However, Dutt’s boss Rana Talwar (then head of Asia Pacific, later to become Standard Chartered’s global CEO) put things in perspective.

“There were these incredible relationships we had built in the past few years, and all we needed were fresh products to keep them alive,” recalls Dutt. The same relationship managers were retrained to become investment consultants. A new, richer, and more diverse business proposition was created within months to ride on this relationship base. “When Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, customers were calling their relationship manager—not to talk business, but simply to vent their anguish on the state of their homeland. We did not have to worry about getting business from these customers. They were too emotionally attached to us based on years of trust,” remembers Dutt. Meanwhile, the country’s liberalized policies attracted other banks to the India opportunity, but “Citibank was already streets ahead of any of them.”

Dutt keeps coming back to the power of building human talent and teamwork. “My strong belief in taking interest in people’s development and giving many that timely opportunity in their career was based on the chances that other people took on for me in my own career—from the student counselor in Boston to Rana Talwar and Jerry Rao who dared asking a corporate banker to pioneer a credit card business in the world’s most credit averse marketplace.”

Outside the U.S., in 1987, corporate banking was still the real place to be—consumer banking was still seen as an experiment by most in Citibank—and a movement from corporate to consumer was not considered the most popular or smartest career choice. Rana Talwar and Jaithirth (Jerry) Rao convinced Dutt otherwise. Nobody wanted to take on the job of launching credit cards because of the odds it faced. A trademark in Dutt’s career has been to take on strategically important challenges that others shied away from. In the years to come, the cards business would be the principal driver of establishing Citibank’s dominant brand position globally.

From a low volume, high ticket, secured lending business with customers in the hundreds, Dutt moved with amazing ease to a high volume, low ticket business marketing to millions of consumers. “The big difference between this and marketing consumer products —we had to get our product (money) back! The market itself was new. There was no concept of credit cards, credit itself was a bad thing, and there was simply no technology to handle the transactional needs of the business,” recalls Dutt.

He began talking to two Indian banks to create India’s first multi-bank ATM network with Citibank. Dutt shipped in ATM machines and the technologies to help the Indian bank partners establish the network. This is where Dutt learned once more that technology implementation for strategic business initiatives has great chance of success under a business manager’s leadership than under pure technologists. He would apply this later in his career for one of Citi’s most critical global initiatives.

Faced with acquiring the Diner’s business and launching a Visa/Mastercard business, Dutt discovered that there was no single card system available off-the-shelf anywhere in the world to cater to a non-U.S. environment—certainly not one that could support millions of cards. The deadline, however, was thrust upon his team; six months. “There was no option—we had to write a system. A card system in 6 months? Everyone thought we were mad.” But the marketing and operations staff were mobilized to customize the specs, partner the technology team in guiding a small software company (now split into Polaris and Nucleus) to write the code module by module.

“It was probably the scariest technology project Citibank had undertaken for a business initiative of such strategic importance and visibility,” smiles Dutt. “But we were oblivious to the downsides—it simply had to be done.” The mainframe environment was out of question for this time frame, the only alternative was the UNIX platform, using Oracle and C++. “Technology seniors from the U.S. visited us with great skepticism—after all, this combination was still guinea pig stuff in the U.S. But technically it made sense, and no one could say for sure that it wouldn’t work, so off we went.”

Citibank launched its cards business in 6 months, the only caveat being the statementing and collections modules came 3 months after launch—just in time. But that was only the beginning of the business challenge. Mass marketing of financial services was not a developed skillbase. So Dutt hired marketing and sales professionals from the consumer products industry, integrated them into banking—another move that raised eyebrows. “Infrastructure was critical. If you want world class performance from a team, you need to have a world class work environment—both physical and cultural.” The factory in Chennai was modeled after the best in class in the U.S.—the workstations looked exactly the same, except they were made of mahogany wood instead of prefab material—and much, much cheaper. Standing on the main Chennai operations floor soon after the 1990 launch, Chairman John Reed could not hold back his glee, “I could be standing in our best U.S. call center—the global consumer vision is coming true.”

But there was another revolution in the making. High volume paper-based data processing of these proportions was not a banking industry core competence. Outsourcing seemed to be the only option, so Dutt encouraged young chartered accountants to set up data entry and paper processing shops—another startling first in the banking environment. Internal auditors swooped down, expecting to find the obvious security issues, only to discover that technology had once again been innovatively leveraged to plug all security risks.

The lack of credit bureaus made direct mail an inefficient customer acquisition channel in the Asian context, although it was the dominant channel in the U.S. So how would Citibank acquire the millions of customers? Dutt’s team once again shocked the system by introducing the concept of an outsourced direct sales infrastructure (yes, door-to-door selling). Consumers had to be educated about a credit card, before a sale could take place. This “crazy” channel later grew to become not only the standard in the Indian market, but the main acquisition channel for Citibank in Asia. Soon outsourcing of customer service, collections, sales and data processing became the norm not just for Citibank, but for its competition—who cautiously followed suit. Later companies like GE and Amex found this very India outsourcing model interesting and took it to a global scale.

Dutt went on to become Citibank’s consumer banking country head in India. “I feel good that I went back and spent two full decades leading the creation of new standards in my country—proving that the Indian mind and spirit can build a world class business, against much heavier odds, at a much lower cost and of outstanding quality.” The key to this tremendous success is investing in people. “You owe it to them to trust your people, empower them and allow them their head. They will not fail. It was this investment in my people that paid off Citibank’s fearless entry into an unknown market.” Dutt flew out in 1998 to head the credit cards, consumer savings, investment and lending (loans/mortgages) products in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean region countries.

From there it was a short step to Managing Director of global cards convergence at headquarters in NY. The new Citigroup management wanted to initiate a significant strategic change—to put in a strong global product line management focus over the existing geographic organizational structure across all main products of the bank. They believed cards could show the way. But there were challenges. “If you took cards, for example, there was not enough standardization. Every country had its own MIS, accounting, reporting, laws, rules and so on. We needed one standard delivery platform. Citibank had tried this standardization previously and had not seen much success even though a lot of money had been invested.”

Dutt’s previous experience prompted him to suggest that the past implementation model was flawed. It was being run by O&T seniors from the U.S. who had little exposure to the international environment—likewise, the international business managers had very little confidence in the model. It needed a business manager to lead it. He was offered the role and he accepted the challenge. Straight away the high overheads in the U.S. were removed, resources given to each country instead, and data processing and software development moved to newly empowered technology leaders in Asia who were already running a regional card center. A new technology platform was adopted and customized. The project—converging over 35 country cards business outside the U.S. into one global processing and business platform—raced to success in a matter of months.

From Citigroup, Dutt moved to Morgan Stanley, where today he is EVP of Marketing for Discover Card. Dutt’s entrepreneurial past has found the perfect home in Discover. This was a business that as recently as the late 80’s dared to enter the cards market with the audacious goal of setting up a proprietary network to compete with Visa and Mastercard. They pioneered 24x7 service, no annual fees and introducing cashback bonus. Today they have 50 million customers and over 4 million merchants. In 2002, Dutt’s team reinforced Discover’s pioneering magic by creating the first physical innovation in credit cards in several decades—the launch of Discover 2Go (a card on a key chain) which won a place in USA Today’s and Business Week’s Best Products of 2002 list.

“The team here is a true pleasure to work with—the most difficult of challenges are a pleasure to handle because you work with a group of down to earth, can-do people whose only goal is to take the ball forward. Discover is now transformed from a single product company to a multiple product/multiple segment business and we’re proud to be leading the change.”

“On one hand I am proud for our country and personally thrilled that we have become truly best in class in something that I was a part of in its humble beginnings. However, I fear that we should not once again get complacent that this one silver bullet will ensure our future economic success.” Social factors in countries like the U.S. will ultimately moderate the runaway success of offshore outsourcing at some point in the future, for example, says Dutt.

“The flight of service sector jobs are more visible than manufacturing. We have the best engineering talent in the world, yet why do we ignore the goal of becoming a global manufacturing power? Why can’t we develop tourism on par with some of our small Asian neighbors? The most underutilized asset we have is our natural beauty and diversity, yet our tourism is a reflection of the initiative that private hotel chains have taken. The lack of infrastructure outside of these “islands of excellence” is embarrassing compared to the potential. We need to get all our various economic levers moving.”

Ashoke Dutt shrugs off one’s awe at his past roles. “I was lucky to be given the opportunity to excel. You can’t do all this alone. With a good team, nothing is impossible. If you’re not afraid of taking on what everyone knows is right to do, but are afraid to do, you can differentiate yourself as someone who made a difference!”