Interview Ashish Nanda
Path to innovation
Ashish Nanda, Managing Director, Innovations Group, discusses the value proposition it offers to regional organizations and its successful partnership with Think Software Services (Think SS).
Ashish Nanda, Managing Director, Innovations Group
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an you please give us a brief background of Innovations Group? I have been in the UAE for 25 years now. Prior to that, I was working in Citibank in India as a retail banker. I came here to the UAE in 1991 to work in Emirates Bank (now Emirates NBD) as a corporate banker. Then in 1994, I decided to become an entrepreneur and started my own financial brokerage company called Image. In 1998, we saw that there was a huge demand for outsourcing services, that’s when we decided to get into the outsourcing business and established Innovations. When we started the company, our op-
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Issue 02 A special supplement of Think Software Services
erations were mostly focused on providing our services to the banking industry. We saw then that the banking sector was growing and players in this space were in need of more resources. Innovations aimed at addressing this demand, especially on the retail banking side, by providing them with the customer services and sales teams they required. The business subsequently grew into providing outsourcing services to other industries including telecom, aviation, government, IT, oil and gas and so on. Over a period of time, the company has grown remarkably, we have offices both here in Dubai and Abu Dhabi now with almost 7000 people on board.
Through your experiences, how do you think the outsourcing industry has evolved over the years? I remember years ago when the concept of outsourcing was still very new in this country, we had to go from one company to another and painstakingly explain to them what it meant. After long periods of conversations, only then could we get a contract or a deal. Now, when I meet with potential clients, if they’re not already doing it with Innovations or with other outsourcing companies, they are already thinking about employing an outsourcing partner. Also, in 2008, the government hadintroduced a licencing requirement for outsourcing companies and I believe that this further recognises the growth of this industry. Today, everyone from the private sectors up to government bodies such as the RTA, Chamber of Commerce, the Ministries have, at one point to another, outsourcing needs. How can businesses improve their bottom line through outsourcing some of their functions? Most large enterprises are in need of extra resources and seek outsourcing services. In context, a bank is expected to provide its customers with a number products and services such as cards, loans, mortgages and so on. They will need numerous people in their workforce to provide all these services. However, a bank’s core function is not on recruiting or managing the people within their organization, now this is where their need for an outsourced workforce comes. The primary aim of outsourcing companies like us is to help our clients focus their key resources on their core functions. They can count on us to manage their customer services, salesforce and other support functions. Now, since the workforce in these functions is provided by us, we also take care of the human resources requirements of people in these teams; matters such as payroll