How’s The Motivation? Is It That High?
What makes EbixCash unique in its own space?
What is unique about us is that we don’t restrict ourselves to a particular business segment but have the technology platform across a broad spectrum of industries such as travel, insurance, forex and remittances, lending, wealth management, elearning, transportation services and BPO services, and I think this is what differentiates us and makes us unique.
Every business has a certain USP. What has made EbixCash stand out?
It is our concept of the airport model, a financial exchange that offers a plethora of end-to end services to the end consumer — both B2B and B-C. I could give you an example that relates to the lending business. Debt recovery has always been a concern for banks and financial institutions and more so in the post-Covid era. We have our flagship product for delinquency management, but it doesn’t stop at that. We can combine this offering with that of our global services business that offers BPO services and will do the tele-calling and field collections and when the borrower wants to repay, he can do so electronically using the EbixCash Card. We have integration with RuPay, or if he is in a remote area, he can visit the EbixCash Retail outlets — we have 300,000 outlets across the country.
What are future strategies and challenges to taking EbixCash to newer heights?
Sudden shift to the work-from-home model has had its own challenges. We were quite unprepared for this and while we transitioned successfully to this new way of working, we are now facing some resistance in going back to working from office.
From a business strategy perspective, we would like to go back to a 100 per cent WFO model but in a phased manner over the next few months, so for some time it would be a hybrid model. We want to explore markets in Latin America like Mexico and Brazil, Australia and New Zealand, and for this the strategy would be to work with alliance partners and markets where Covid has not had much of an impact.
From a product perspective our strategy would be to build partnerships with players with expertise in niche areas like data science, AI and ML rather than building everything ourselves.
What are your views on leadership?
Typically, in the technology business our main asset is our employees and keeping them motivated through continuous communication in these trying times is most important. EbixCash Financial Technologies group today has more than 2,500 technology professionals across domains such as lending, wealth & asset management, insurance and travel among others. To my mind humility, and integrity both internally and externally and the ability to lead by example are the foundation qualities that are necessary for the success of any business.
