Interview Questions

Full Interview with Arjun Malhotra

Arjun Malhotra:

To me, innovation is very simple - if anything changes my quality of life, then that's innovation for me. I drive innovation by asking people what they have done to change someone's quality of life - be it your boss, your colleague, somebody reporting to you, or your customers. We keep it at a very grassroots level because it has to have an impact on an individual. When you put your head to pillow on a Friday night, you have to figure out what you have done in the week that made a difference to somebody's life. If we can't answer this simple question, then why are we wasting our time doing what a million other people can do?

Arjun Malhotra:

Our clients want us to deliver solutions that are different, better, and implemented in a way that has not been done before, so that they can get an edge. We have developed systems for rule-based trading - if a particular stock dips below a threshold, then sell it. If you take objects and integrate them with a rules engine, you get something unique, something nobody else has done. It gave a client of ours a very efficient solution.
For example, one of our clients wanted to check all the trades for compliance for which there were around 16,000 rules. The engine was taking almost five seconds, but they wanted to do it in real time. With a billion trades, how do you check on 16,000 parameters for each of them? To solve this problem, we suggested a BI system that is hardware-based so that it can work fast.

Arjun Malhotra:

It's actually gone up. Today it is probably 75 percent. Over the next three years, we want to take it between 80 and 85 percent. Why? Because I have something unique. We have domain expertise in capital markets and we do domain consulting. We can tell you how you can run your business more efficiently.

Arjun Malhotra:

The vision of the company is to be the leader in the capital markets space. But you can't be a leader with a turnover of $200 million. When we get to $500 million - and I think that we will in three years - then we can say that we are a half-a-billion-dollar company.

We think that we have a good chance being leaders because our competition has been bought over. So, there is no one our size today in that space. We also have a solid reputation with our clients. We have the top 20 investment banks as our clients, and we offer them services that they can't get from most other vendors.

But in the end we don't want to be the biggest; we want to be the best.

 

Arjun Malhotra:

The vision of the company is to be the leader in the capital markets space. But you can't be a leader with a turnover of $200 million. When we get to $500 million - and I think that we will in three years - then we can say that we are a half-a-billion-dollar company.
We think that we have a good chance being leaders because our competition has been bought over. So, there is no one our size today in that space. We also have a solid reputation with our clients. We have the top 20 investment banks as our clients, and we offer them services that they can't get from most other vendors.
But in the end we don't want to be the biggest; we want to be the best.

Arjun Malhotra:

Yes, I think that the CIO is not just an IT person. He is more of a business person today. He must understand my business. In my company, we don't call him a CIO; we call him a technology head. This person does not hold a permanent position- he is chosen by rotation among our senior management. We have this system because I think that knowledge of  business is far more important than knowledge of technology. Since the person is chosen from my management council, he is always on my management council.

Arjun Malhotra:

If you understand the business, then you will find a way to justify RoI, because that is what the business sees. If the CIO concentrates on how he can make a difference to his business, he'll get RoI. For instance, if you can generate information in 30 minutes, and you can optimize your query and reporting system to get an answer in 15 minutes, the question is: whom does it make a difference to? If it doesn't make any difference to your business, then there is no RoI to be gained by this optimization.

Arjun Malhotra:

Risk has many facets like business continuity, DR, client migration risk, and so on. By and large, we in India are not as good as the US, partly because our traditional management style is based on trust. We will have to change, because as we do business for US companies, we will face a very different cultural mindset.
Their way of working is different from how we look at things here. I'm not saying what we do in India is wrong - I actually prefer the Indian system because then I feel that I have to I live up to that trust. Sometimes, you are cheated - I believe that 5 percent of the people you do business with are going to take advantage of you. That's okay; just don't deal with them again. But don't let that 5 percent decide how you are going to live your life with the other 95 percent.

Arjun Malhotra:

The vision of the company is to be the leader in the capital markets space. But you can't be a leader with a turnover of $200 million. When we get to $500 million - and I think that we will in three years - then we can say that we are a half-a-billion-dollar company.

We think that we have a good chance being leaders because our competition has been bought over. So, there is no one our size today in that space. We also have a solid reputation with our clients. We have the top 20 investment banks as our clients, and we offer them services that they can't get from most other vendors.

But in the end we don't want to be the biggest; we want to be the best.