— Polaris Chief Financial Officer S.R. Ramaswami
Not many in the information technology circle know that the name of Polaris Software Labs was recently changed to Polaris FT or Financial Technology.
This reflects the company's transition from a small software lab started by Mr Arun Jain in 1993 in Chennai to a Financial Technology company consisting of a blend of product and services to help its customers run their business efficiently and with ease.
In the last six years, Polaris had invested nearly $100 million on Intellect suite of products, which covers core banking, lending, credit cards, private banking; wealth management and brokerage and securities platform.
As chief financial officer and one of the senior management personnel of Polaris, Mr S.R. Ramaswami has been part of this transition. Polaris is the chosen outsourcing partner for nine of the top 10 global banks and seven of the 10 top global insurance companies.
In the next 3-5 years, Polaris as a group will be a major FT company comprising solution business, services for specific accounts and research, he said in an interview.
Excerpts of the interview:
Long journey
Nearly two decades ago, Polaris started as a lab; it incubated; built a competency of technology and domain, and brought in product competency.
“Now we are ready to provide technology, and moving as a technology company,” he said.
Polaris FT enables clients to handle financial transactions deals effectively and efficiently and with ease.
The effectiveness is given by bankers who set the regulations, the allocations and the ease of doing business. However, the efficiency of doing business is provided by Polaris.
In 2004, McKinsey suggested that Polaris should become a solutions-based company, and that is “what we have done. We ploughed in our profits to build the company.
“We have grown the services business, but the significant investment was made in the product business — called Intellect. Over $100 million was spent on the product till 2008 — when the transition started happening.
“We are in the right stage of crossing Rs 500 crore of revenue in this year from products alone,” he said.
Domain knowledge
Polaris has 10-12 experiences in the service delivery. The acquisition of OrbiTech brought us the global finance experience while Polaris had the retail banking experience.
Polaris added Lasersoft to get the geographical advantage in India and Africa markets and also experience in the Central banks; SEEC to gain insurance domain; IndigoTX for brokerage and IdenTrust for hosting experience. The acquisitions have been in line with Polaris' vision to become a large company with a blend of both product and service.
Today, Polaris has the capability to understand the domain, complexity reduction and technology and the product suite. It can provide a solution to address a client's throughput improvement; provide technology to improve the effectiveness of the bank's business throughput, he said.
Endorsements
It takes 10-12 years to build a technology company.
“We can now claim to be a good technology company. There could be some areas that are missing, but 98 per cent we are ready. May be we need to build more capabilities in areas like analytics,” he said.
In 2011, two major endorsements happened for us. Region-by-region, there is acceptance of our product. Global research analysts like Gartner, Forrester and Everest are looking at our product. We were not considered till 2011. It is about the blend of service and product solutions.
