1. Please tell us a bit about yourself, both at work and leisure.
Empathy and trust have played a pivotal role in shaping my worldview, and the way I engage with my business partners, colleagues, friends and family. I grew up in India and moved to Germany 17 years ago that essentially means that I combine the deep-rooted values in both societies and cultures.
In my leisure time I passionately read German literature, philosophy and learning violin.
2. What products or services do you offer, and to whom?
Nagarro’s core value system is CARING, which is an acronym of our 7 values namely: Customer centric, agile, responsible, intelligent, non-hierarchical, global and of course Caring. We offer strategy consulting on latest technologies and leading products, product lifecycle management and maintenance services. We create tailor made engagement models with onshore, near-shore and offshore centres thus making it a truly global setup.
3. Any recent projects or partnerships that you would like to share with us?
Some of our recent projects are on omnichannel platforms development, designing and implementing open architectures and making systems of our clients in EEA compliant against regulations such as GDPR, SEPA, MiFiD2 and IFRS16 among others.
Our partnerships include ebankIT, Backbase and Mambu. In addition to these, we also cherish long-term partnerships with large CRM, ERP, CMS, and cloud platform providers, among others.
4. What are your focus areas, overall and within FinTech?
Our overall focus is to enable technological innovation driven by thorough understanding of customer behaviour. Our Thinking Breakthroughs framework helps us to analyse business problems using first principles approach and hence design simple solutions for otherwise complex topics. While engaging with FinTechs we focus on rapid prototyping as it helps us collect feedback and improvise. We leverage our product centric delivery approach and have a dedicated Product Manager (PM) to participate in market research and to comprehend needs of end users. Post this, the PM participates in an agile delivery model with frequent client demos thus resulting in stellar customer satisfaction as corroborated by our CSAT scores that are consistently around ~98% for the last 13 quarters.
5. What is your advice to Europe’s FinTech firms looking to scale?
Machine learning (credit decisioning), Cloud (security as well as operational costs optimization) and Blockchain (disintermediation) are technologies that are disrupting the financial marketplace. More use cases will emerge using these (or newer) technologies going forward. ISVs have a wealth of experience and partnerships that could be leveraged to allow FinTech firms to concentrate on their core product offerings whereas the ISVs reduce the operating costs necessary to scale.
Look at profitable growth by revisiting marketing (specially customer acquisition) costs and be open to look at building partnerships with incumbents to attain scale.
6. Which are the trends to watch out for in the next 6-18 months?
Here are some of our forward-looking point of views.
- The players who provide better customer experience, which is contextual and personalized, shall emerge as the new leaders
- Real-time transparency and visibility in customer interactions is necessary
- Architectures will need to be flexible to make use of latest technology innovations
- Regulatory landscape is dynamic and expected to evolve, so stay tuned for latest happenings in the space
- Blockchain or distributed ledger technology is at the brink of mass adoption and will change authentication and data storage models as we know it!
7. What is on your bookshelf or reading list, and your favourite place for a coffee and/ or a drink?
Currently I am reading a book called Zero to One by Peter Thiel that talks about how to build a company for future.
Maincafe which is located directly along the riverside (above the “Filmmuseum”) in Sachsenhausen, is my favourite place.