News and Events - 2011

Aditya Krishna, Founder and MD, Saksoft Group
The Journal of Compliance Risk & Oppertunity (CRO) interviewed Aditya Krishna and published it on April 2011 edition

CRO: How, and when did you establish Saksoft?
Krishna: I come from an entrepreneurial family. My dad has been running a very successful manufacturing business for the last few decades. I have been a banker prior to my entrepreneurial career. I worked with Citibank in their corporate headquarters in New York till 1990 and then returned to India as part of a team which started Citi's credit card business.

The cards business was new in India in those years. It was an exciting thing to do, issuing cards to the rich and mighty and the growing middle class to grow the business. Citibank was the pioneer in credit cards in India and we had to learn a lot about doing cards business in India. Lot of that learning has gone into our products today and I am proud that our products have paved the way for the analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) for retail banking in India.

In 1995, I left Citibank and started Nationwide Finance as an initiative to provide unsecured finance to the underserviced segment of people in India. This was my first venture as an entrepreneur. Nationwide Finance had a unique business model and performed well.

In 2000, the company was bought by Citibank. That was the time I decided that my next venture will be something that will provide information management solutions to banking and financial services industry and Saksoft was founded.

Today, we are an information management specialist company and employ 500 people at Chennai, Noida, Singapore, Manchester, London, New York and Chicago.

CRO: Which was the first product launched by Saksoft? When was it offered to the market, and who was the first taker?
Krishna: We launched Saksoft as an information management company and our first project was with a credit management company in US. We started building products and applications for them in the area of credit reporting and direct-to-customer websites.

Based on my cards' experience, we built our first product called EasyInfo which has been a precursor to the Veri-sens product we have now. EasyInfo is a retail banking dashboard that allows for analytical reporting across credit cards, mortgages, loans and liabilities. The first client was Citibank who customised and rolled out this product to over 40 countries globally.

CRO: What are your key offerings for the BFSI segment? Who are your major clients in BFSI sector?
Krishna:Our offerings to the BFSI segment are in the area of managing their information management needs. We have offerings in consulting, products, managed services and education. This allows us to provide end-toend instant messaging services to all BFSI clients. We have also added independent testing and web technologies as complementary offerings to ensure that we provide maximum value to our clients.

Our clients in BFSI range from key top 10 banks globally, a large section of private sector banks in India, and one of the largest credit management solutions company.

CRO: What is Saksoft's relationship with TransUnion?
Krishna:TransUnion is a valuable customer and we have been assisting them in development and support tasks.

CRO: Has Saksoft undergone a change in ownership since its inception in 2000?
Krishna:Saksoft is a publicly listed company in the NSE and BSE and has not undergone any change in ownership. Our senior management team also owns an equity stake in the company.

CRO: Who are your major clients in India and abroad?
Krishna:Due to confidentiality arrangements, we cannot name our clients. But I can tell you some of our key successes in the last 12 months.

Prima, our loyalty management solution has been implemented by a large Indian bank that has 4 million credit card holders; and also by one of the oldest banks across 5 countries in the AsiaPacific and Australia region. We are also building a credit reporting solution platform for one of our clients that will be rolled out across multiple countries. In addition to this, we have also recently done a multiyear managed services deal with one of our large credit management customers and won a prestigious contract to manage the Border Control Business Intelligence solution in one of the government departments in Europe.