The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.
March - 2012 - issue > CEO Speak
Experiment and then choose the right business model
Vimali Swamy
Since the company started its operations in 1999, he has held various roles including CFO and President & CEO. Prior to joining EXL, Rohit was a business head at Deutsche Bank and led a marketing team that serviced clients in Europe, the Middle East and the Indian Sub-continent. He also managed the venture capital and private equity investments of several Ultra High Net Worth clients in start-up companies both in the U.S. and Indian TMT sectors. Rohit successfully raised several rounds of venture capital funding for various companies and he was also involved in the structuring of their investments. Earlier, he worked for eight years with Bank of America - five of which were in Private Banking in New York and three in Corporate Banking in India. Rohit holds a B.Tech from IIT Delhi and an MBA from the IIM Ahmedabad, India.
The leap into IT
I started my journey in marketing and product development with Nestle. From there I switched over to banking, with Bank of America in India. Then I was fortunate enough to get relocated to the U.S. to start a new business for the bank. Setting up that business, hiring new people for it and developing it gave me a lot of learning opportunity. It was at Bank of America that I met and worked with Vikram Talwar, and later both of us went on to found EXL. The whole journey has been really fascinating and for the last 12 years, building up a company in the BPO space was a very rewarding experience.
My time with the bank gave me the opportunity to be part of several private equity investments and many of these where in IT Services companies. This gave me the initial exposures into this arena, how these companies are setup, their business model, and more. One of the main things that I realized is that IT companies are highly customer centric organizations. They were keen to listen to their customers and providing high value services to their customers with a great deal of care and attention. These companies also were highly flexible. This knowledge helped me a lot in creating EXL as there was not much differentiation that you could create during the early stages of a company. The differentiation would really come through the mindset and the approach the company took towards its clients and whether you buildup a reputation among your clients.
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