Interview with K Nanda Kumar Founder, President & CEO, SunTec Business Solutions
Please tell us about your company?
SunTec Business Solutions helps clients increase the lifetime value of their customer relationships through effective revenue management and real-time customer experience orchestration. With a legacy of deployments in 58 countries, SunTec is a trusted partner of the world’s leading banks and digital and communication service providers. Headquartered in India, we have our offices in USA, UK, Germany, UAE and Singapore.
SunTec has a team comprising of highly skilled individuals working with innovative product development models.
One such product that SunTec is proud of is Xelerate, which is an incredibly stable, mature and flexible product suite, benchmarked regularly for optimum performance. Xelerate continues to develop along with the market seamlessly integrating with any ecosystem, making it one of the fastest products to implement.
What services you are offering in India?
SunTec, from an India stand-point, is working with top Indian banks and helping them prepare ahead of the GST rollout on 1st July. GST will no doubt impact banks and financial institutions across multiple dimensions. Under the GST regime, the aspect of recognizing revenues, procurements and credits would need to be revisited. SunTec, through its Xelerate for GST solution, will be a partner to the bank in meeting the planned roll out this year. This ‘out-of-the-box’ solution with pre-set rules and definitions can be easily configured and will offer centralized management of information, simplified processes and easy identification, segregation, application, reversals and consolidation of charges.
What is your USP and what differentiates you from your competitors?
SunTec’s industry agnostic product suite Xelerate, caters to 8 of the top 10 banks in India. The product is used by around 40 clients spread across 60 countries with around 300 million end customers.
Xelerate helps our clients extract maximum value from existing systems by easy integration and automation of the manual business processes, Xelerate has been instrumental in driving down operational expenditure by more than 40% for a top brokerage firm in the US and reducing the bill generation lead time by close to 90% in one of the top global banks.
The highly configurable nature of Xelerate allows business users to use the system intuitively through effective product management, thereby decreasing turn-around time for launching new products and price-plans. Using Xelerate, our clients have brought down the complexity of creation and launch of an offer. Xelerate also helps them to understand their customers better thereby enabling them to create the perfect offer for their customers.
Xelerate helps rationalize products across not only the organization but also throughout the ecosystem, and enables clients to offer successful product bundles, including products and services from other service providers, to customers irrespective of customer account hierarchies and complexities related to multiple entities and geographies. Such bundles have been launched using Xelerate in as less as two days’ time, providing clients with a considerable competitive advantage and allowing them to increase their portfolio and enhance customer stickiness.
Using Xelerate, our clients can view the global relationship of the customer and ensure that the best personalized deal is delivered to the customer at the right place at the right time. The dynamic offer design capabilities are further aided by contextual product and customer insights through state-of the art analytics capabilities, thereby enabling informed business decisions.
With out of the box functionalities, clients are able to get instant visibility on the potential fitment of the solution in any business context. Xelerate has 64 installations in 58 countries enabling 38 clients serve 290 million end customers.
What has been your performance in last financial year and what targets you have set for coming year?
From an India stand-point, it has been a great year as we are working with top Indian banks that we have signed up with and helping them prepare ahead of the GST rollout on 1st July. Internationally, we are looking at expanding our footprint and not only continuing to work with top banking institutions, but also expand to working with distinguished name in the digital and communications services industry.
To achieve better results based on the core beliefs and values, SunTec has set ambitious goals across four pillars namely – people, process, product and clients. Here the focus is on attaining the pinnacle of quality by following strong, adaptable processes which are built on the best practices and learnings imbibed from the industry.
How do you view the size of Indian market and what are the future prospects?
The Indian market has been vast and varied with a mix of PSUs, private banks and the newer payment banks.
There has been an increasing trend of banks moving to a much more customer-centric model bringing to attention the importance for relationship based pricing solutions.
Most of the more innovative banks understand that it is not only financial products that they need to sell to their customers, but become relevant as a partner to the ecosystem. To understand how value is generated and consumed within the ecosystem, an enterprise solution is absolutely necessary. The need of the hour is middle office solution which can give banks the complete vision of the customer.
You are having operations in many countries. How has International Operation helped to bring cutting edge technology in India?
The banking market in different regions specifically, the European market is highly innovative, going through constant metamorphosis in terms of products, services, schemes and relations. SunTec is a product company where we believe in imbibing the best practices from around the world into our product. This helps in developing a product which can do things that some of the local banks are not thinking about, we facilitate our customers with evolved solutions that helps them maintain the competitive edge.
Are you planning to launch any new products/services?
SunTec as a company is constantly on the lookout for new developments that will impact target markets. Launching SunTec’s new offering – Xelerate for GST prior to the GST roll-out in India is one such example. Similarly, the new EU directive, PSD2 will roll-out in the European market early 2018. The launch of PSD2 will be a game changing year for banking as we know it. PSD2 enables bank customers, both consumers and businesses, to use third-party providers to manage their finances.
For banks to comply they will have to allow third parties safe and secure access to their highly sensitive data. This directive will increase innovation, reinforce consumer protection and improve the security of online payments and account access within the EU. SunTec’s new offering will enable banks orchestrate end-to-end monetization and management of APIs exposed across the ecosystem.
Any other development you would like to share.
SunTec has signed on some of the big private names in the BFSI sector to help them with their GST Roll out and are in the process of signing on more. We have partnered with global financial services organisations for their effective revenue management and customer experience orchestration. The company’s advanced solution Xelerate for GST enables banks to unify GST compliance across multiple lines of business so to be ready for the rollout.
About Mr. K Nanda Kumar
A technology evangelist with over 26 years in the industry, Nanda Kumar (NK) has shaped the wave of customer-centric software platforms and solutions for pricing and billing, particularly in transaction-intensive verticals. He pioneered the concept of relationship-based pricing – an idea industry analysts and thought leaders now acknowledge as the key to balanced pricing dynamics.
NK has made SunTec one of the global leaders in revenue management and business assurance space in the financial and telecom industries. Under the guidance of NK, SunTec has forayed into areas such as offer management, loyalty and relationship based pricing. Under his leadership, the company has won several awards and is considered as a leader in enterprise products.
He has delivered numerous talks across global forums such as SIBOS, 3G Mobile Forum, Indian Banking Summit, Gartner Summits etc. He is also a widely read writer who has written for many technology oriented newsletters and blogs. NK holds a master’s degree in management and physics.