Interview: Mohit Thukral Senior Vice President and Head Financial Services, Genpact

Tuesday, 14 October 2008

Mohit Thukral
With over a decade’s experience in the Insurance and Financial Services domain, Mohit has been instrumental in setting up the vertical that manages over 15 global partners in the US, UK, and Australia. He has successfully established systematic operations out of India and the Philippines, delivering high-quality business processing services. Mohit has played a key role in executing the global outsourcing strategy of our partners and benchmarking processes to drive stable operations, best-in-class attrition and high reference ability from our customers.

Genpact was the first company in India to provide outsourcing services for Insurance and Mohit, in his capacity, played a key role in setting up the Insurance process operations for the Insurance business in the country. His career with Genpact spans over 10 years including his serving in roles of Operations, Business Development, Global Six Sigma, and Process Excellence & Delivery.

ValueNotes: How has life been after GE?
Mohit

Mohit: Our journey from a captive to an independent company formed in 2005 has been phenomenal. Today, we work with the top 20-25 Fortune 1000 companies across financial services, automobiles, healthcare, manufacturing verticals. Obviously, GE continues to be our biggest customer contributing close to 50% of revenues. We have now built traction in the market and people see us today as a highly competitive, pure play outsourcing service provider of business and knowledge services as well as technology solutions.

ValueNotes: How has the relationship changed with GE?

Mohit: Overall, our relationship with GE continues to strengthen. With GE being a shareholder in Genpact, we leverage the GE alumni for relationships. Many ex-GE employees continue to work with us and we have an excellent relationship with the current GE leadership. Like any of our other customers, GE continues to demand the highest quality of service and we are committed to delivering on expectations while they remain a great reference point for us.

ValueNotes: What challenges has Genpact faced in the transformation from a captive to a third party service provider?

Mohit: Genpact has imbibed its DNA from GE. We inherited one of the best leadership teams from GE and many of our current employees have worked within GE. Initially, when we spun off as an independent company, sourcing business had its challenges and while presenting as a third party provider we had to adapt and align our proposition to the market realities of newer clients.

Given our lineage, we continued to speak the ‘GE language’ - in terms of our practices, techniques and terminology. While this reflected our strong connection with GE, we also realized the need to walk the clients’ talk. The first six to nine months, which were the most critical period in our transformation, made for great learning. During this period we took decisive steps and shifted gears to converse and communicate our “value proposition” to a wider audience beyond the GE community.

Initially, we were also concerned about how our employees would react to the change over from GECIS to Genpact. However, interestingly, since we became Genpact, we have only grown in strength with our attrition coming down by 2% every year. This year it stands at 25% (overall) which is significantly lower than the overall BPO industry.

ValueNotes: What are the key differentiators of Genpact?

Mohit: Our focus is to drive business impact and increase end customer experience. There are four basic areas where we have made a mark in the market: One: Our biggest differentiator and edge is our ability to understand the power of process and the capability to drive enterprise level end-to-end service using tools like Six Sigma and Lean to deliver significant business impact and continuous improvement for our customers. Two: Domain knowledge - we have built this across various verticals, which is our key strength. Three: Genpact is a truly global company. We have operations in US, Mexico, Guatemala, Hungary, Romania, Poland Philippines, India and China. We have a WW footprint that helps us serve corporations globally. Four: What helps us maintain our leadership position is our focus on our employees. Our HR practices are one of the best in the industry and have been vital in attracting and retaining top talent with deep domain expertise across multiple verticals and horizontals. We continue to receive recognition across the world, and bodies like COPC have certified us for the best HR practices.

ValueNotes: Going forward, what is your take on acquisitions, are you looking at niche players?

Mohit: We have made three successful acquisitions in 2006-2007; a SAP provider in the Netherlands (to bolster our SAP practice), a mortgage processing company in California, and a revenue cycle management company in New Jersey. Going forward, we will continue to focus on both organic as well as inorganic growth to strengthen our presence within the verticals we serve by building niche capabilities.

ValueNotes: Given the fact that margins have been squeezed, this industry has witnessed consolidation. Also news about moving up the value chain has become essential these days. What are your thoughts on this?

Mohit: Genpact has always been about delivering quality high-end work; in fact very few of our processes are purely voice based. We have been involved in high value transactional work within equity research, book closing, underwriting, actuarial science, pricing models, high-end accounting, etc. I believe that our value chain has really improved over the last few years.

ValueNotes: Given the slowdown in US, what is your take on this and do you think there is going to be any impact on the outsourcing industry?

Mohit: Companies that have already moved on the globalization track are accelerating their offshoring program. In the near term, the globalization industry will feel the impact of slowdown, due to changes at management level within companies. So even though the CEOs of some of these companies may have changed their agenda overnight to align with market challenges, their milestones towards offshoring have not shifted. We believe that companies who have been on this track for a longer period will use offshoring to drive cost efficiency, productivity and globalization.

The dichotomy is that people who were off the block quicker and doing this longer will continue to accelerate and see growth from their existing customers. New customers will probably take longer to decide given current market conditions.

ValueNotes: Going forward how do you see the offshoring business model evolving over the next 5 years? Given the cost arbitrage, talk about slow down, do you think the business model will significantly change for BPO?

Mohit: We do not think there will be much change. More and more companies will look to globalize their work and move to different locations around the globe. We believe that there is demand, growth potential and an opportunity to tap into. There is likely to be consolidation with some of the smaller players merging with the bigger ones. However, it may be presumptuous at this time to determine the pace at which this will happen.

ValueNotes: How has the buyer - vendor relationship changed over the last 5 years? Have there been any specific initiatives taken to handle the change?

Mohit: Seven to ten years ago any buyer would treat outsourcing partners as vendors. However, Genpact has been fortunate, as buyers have understood the value we bring, and now increasingly treat us as their partners. If you talk to any of our customers, the feedback received is encouraging. This has largely been due to the partnership model that we adopted. Genpact has been transparent with its customers and increasingly looked at newer ways to improve their business processes. If we look at the outsourcing scene 5 years ago, it was like a black box - where vendors after taking the process over from buyers used to manage services on their own and no one knew how these were being handled. However, today the picture is vastly different, with companies getting increasingly involved in the management of their own processes.

One of our biggest differentiators has been to build a lot of visibility with our partners in terms of performance, process, sharing views on our employees, on the work that they do, etc. The team in Genpact is an extension to the client’s team - which we call the Virtual Captive TM model. Apart from transparency, Genpact has engaged with its clients at many levels, sharing strategies as well as future plans. We also hold periodic roundtable conferences where we invite top executives from our key customers to share their views and best practices. These meetings make our clients inclusive while giving them a chance to interact with one another resulting in the germination and cross-pollination of ideas. With this approach we have been able to build a close community of Genpact customers.

ValueNotes: What in your opinion, will be the impact of US election (on outsourcing/offshoring)?

Mohit: With the current financial crisis, there is bound to be a lot of political debate and dialogue. We will have to wait and watch and see how matters evolve.

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