President & Head, Global Applications & Engineering Services, Country Manager – India, Xchanging
Xchanging has been providing business processing, technology and procurement services over the years. In conversation with digital Learning, Alok Sinha, President & Head, Global Applications & Engineering Services, Country Manager – India, Xchanging, talks about their plans for India.
What has Xchanging been doing so far? How has been the beginning? What are the various initiatives that you have worked out till now?
Xchanging is close to a billion dollar company, headquartered in London, UK. The company started about 14 years back with a very innovative model termed as Enterprise Partnership. We were able to maximise our returns on investment and that helped us sign long-term contracts. We have a joint venture with Lloyd’s of London, the oldest insurance market in the world. We have built and warrant their entire technology infrastructure. So, every insurance activity done by any Lloyd broker, sub-broker or customer, anywhere in the world, is executed via our system.
In 2008-09, we started focusing on increasing our footprint in the US and India, and acquired India-based Cambridge Solutions Limited to establish presence in both these geographies. In Insurance, we sell our products under the brand of Xuber (acquired by Xchanging), through which we sell business software products for insurance companies. There are around 140-160 companies who are using our software.
Today, with over 4000 employees spread across seven locations in the country, Xchanging provides services within BPS, Technology and Procurement. Approximately 30% of our workforce in India is based out of Tier 3 locations such as Shimoga and Solan, where employees are well equipped to do complex jobs including engineering design, aviation claims, and healthcare processes.
“With over 4000 employees spread across seven locations across the country, Xchanging provides services within BPS, Technology and Procurement”
How does your learning platform model work? What initiatives did you take with the Malaysian government?
1BestariNet, a virtual learning environment (VLE) initiative, was rolled out by Malaysia’s Ministry of Education (MoE) in 2011, in partnership with Xchanging Malaysia, to give shape to a new vision for 2020 that would transform the country’s learning environment, and reduce the urban and rural divide in education.
Xchanging’s cloud-based solution helped create an online education community via a virtual network, linking 5.5 million students, 500,000 teachers, 10,000 schools and 4.5 million parents- giving them access to the same systems and content, regardless of location. 1BestariNet made Malaysia the first country in the world to deliver a single, nation-wide cloud-based learning platform via high-speed 4G internet connectivity. Xchanging also provides a learning management system to deliver educational resources through a software platform from Frog – the ‘Frog Store’ – and collates free content from providers such as YouTube and Discovery Channel. With this project, schools have experienced cost savings through the cloud-based delivery of content.
“We are working on a project related to nation-building and are glad to be part of it. We are working with at least 4-5 states”
What are your plans for India?
We are working on a project that will immensely contribute to the nationbuilding efforts, and we are glad to be part of it. We are evaluating opportunities with at least 4-5 states that have shown keen interest in our work that we have done in Malaysia and are evaluating the potential to make similar implementations. These projects take time to make an impact. We plan to create a customer experience centre at our locations which will happen in 2-3 months’ time. We are going to create one education learning platform and one customer experience centre in Bangalore.
How does the Internet of Things (IoT) sector work?
By 2020, CISCO estimates that 50 billion data devices will be connected. At Xchanging, we see opportunities to particularly improve customers’ lives with IoT solutions in the automotive and real estate sectors. We take a wider perspective-it is not just the Internet of Things, the process of interconnectivity includes people as well. We have customers in real estate, manufacturing, automotive, and retail. We have built our own framework which can enable new technology to work. MachineShop, a horizontal provider of next-generation enterprise middleware, complements Xchanging’s IoT offerings and will enable the company to enter into new industries beyond the existing areas of real estate, utilities, logistics and automotive.
Any plans to work the insurance and finance field in India as well?
Xchanging is a SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) partner, to 70 banks globally. The entire Dhaka Stock Exchange has been running on our software for the last five years. We are coming out with the third piece of insurance which is called Netsett. The Netsett platform is the result of a partnership between Xchanging and Deutsche Bank. The platform seeks to replicate, on a global basis, the cash liquidity and operational cost-saving benefits from which the London market has long benefited through the Xchanging Inssure Services (XIS) central settlement platform. We want to bring a similar concept in India too.
