It has been a significant metamorphosis for Chennai-based Arun Jain from a company primarily focussed on IT services to one that is solely in the product development in the banking space. An outcome of this development is that his erstwhile competitors in the services space will now implement his products.

Jain’s first company — Polaris Consulting and Services — used to compete with system integrators such as Accenture, IBM, TCS, Infosys, Cognizant and Wipro to implement solutions for big product companies. However, one of its competitors will now turn a system integrator for Jain’s second baby, Intellect Design Arena Ltd, to implement its product for banks globally. “We are talking to four of the top services firms to become system integrators,” Jain told Business Line .

In 2014, Polaris split its business into product, and consulting/services. The next year it sold its consulting and services business to US-based Virtusa to focus on developing banking products by forming Intellect Design Arena.

And the decision appears to have paid off. Intellect crossed a milestone of ₹1,000 crore revenue in first three years of formation. And from here on, the target is to double revenue every three years, says Jain, Chairman and Managing Director, Intellect Design.

For fiscal ended March 3, 2018, the city-based provider of digital and financial technologies reported a net profit of ₹47 crore as against a net loss of ₹22 crore in previous fiscal. Revenue increased by 19 per cent to ₹1,087 crore (₹913 crore).

Crossing ₹1,000 crore revenue for a pure product company with licence revenue of around ₹200 crore was a fulfilment of a dream to create a global product company out of India, says Jain. “We invested nearly ₹1,000 crore in R&D and sales and marketing,” he said.

Intellect today serves around 250 customers through offices in over 40 countries and with a diverse workforce of over 4,000 solution architects, domain and technology experts in major global financial hubs globally..

Branding

A product company is different from an IT services company. Product is a branding game. Earlier, ‘I used to believe that 30 per cent was sales and marketing and 70 per cent was product. In last three years, it is 60 per cent marketing and 40 per cent product. When somebody is buying our product, he/she is buying your religion. A bank will be with Intellect for next 20 years. Winning a deal is similar to winning a cricket game in which each member has different responsibility but collectively the target is to win the match.

The company was separated with a quarterly revenue ₹150 crore, and doubled to ₹307 crore in Mach 2018 quarter. “We kept up our promise to double quarterly revenue to our investors at a meeting three years ago,” he said.

The company’s second phase starts this year with target to double in every aspects, including revenue, in next three years. Doubling in profitability should happen next year itself. The focus is developing robust product that will not fail and deepen customer relationship and increase value for customers.

Intellect will have sales and implementation partners in Africa, West Asia and Asia Pacific while in US and Europe.

“Our fight is only with global companies like Mysis, Funtech and Temenos. We are winning more deals than others despite pricing higher than others. There is a perception that Indian companies sell cheap products. However, “we are 30 per cent higher than my counterpart from other countries. Customer are willing to pay that 30 per cent more due to quality of the product,” he said.

Jain said the company is pursuing 32 large deals that can close in next 12 months with orders varying ₹12-50 crore per deal.

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