I-Flex Solutions Ltd

1. How did i-flex emerge as global leader in the banking solutions space?

i-flex’s emergence as a global leader in the banking space can be attributed to their expansion strategy on the back of access to certain resources. Their efforts were consistent with their guiding principles: domain expertise, global focus and customer focus.

Resources:

1. i-flex started off with employees having a healthy risk appetite and entrepreneurial mind-set. It set an ambitious future direction for i-flex, an Indian company to enter and became well-entrenched into an industry with high entry barriers.
2. Existing product (Microbanker) and presence in African market

Expansion Strategy:

After a lukewarm response in India, i-flex targeted small banks in Africa primarily because of two reasons:

1. installed customer base was predominantly in Africa
2. its competitors were absent in these markets

i-flex expanded geographically into Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Caribbean and Eastern Europe, though they could not enter US and had little presence in Europe. i-flex retained focus on small banks at a time when it did not have the reputation, brand and products to crack bigger markets.

To overcome its disadvantages, i-flex spent considerable resources in NPD. The company, in a departure from the past:

1. staffed team with bankers in addition to technologists in light of the changing competitive context
2. moved from “account-centric” to a “customer-centric” system
3. created common service levels; parameterization helped in significantly reducing lead time and being more responsive to consumers’ needs
4. developed a multi-currency, multi-language system to be truly global
5. developed a modular system with a common core and separate functional modules

Customer focus: 

Through local support centres and higher level support centres, service periodic user meets, and their consulting services, they were abreast of changing customer preferences and used them as opportunities for knowledge sharing and reference generation.

Inflection point:

The Citibank deal was a major inflection point in their growth journey which removed their biggest barrier (references) in nearly 100 countries.

1. Evaluate the contribution of Rajesh Hukku and his top management team in the company’s success.

Rajesh Hukku and his top management team played a key role in i-flex’s rise to the top. The idea of creating a management structure closer to the customer was one of the key elements of its success. Most of the senior management people were there with the company since the beginning and understood the culture of the company well. They created an open, collegial and non-hierarchical international organization. Hukku and the top management were instrumental in laying down the guiding principles which lay the direction foe the firm’s strategy. Following the principles, the team did not take up Y2K despite that fact that it would double the revenue. The team leveraged it prior experience to compete in the industry. Further, there were intense debates and wonderful projects conceptualised during them,

1. What role did the companies guiding principles play in its success?

The three guiding principles laid down by Hukku and his team were domain expertise, global focus and customer focus. I-flex sustained its growth momentum by setting up Centres of Excellence in technology and business domains import to financial institutions.

Their domain expertise was a differentiator and enabled them to sell on the value rather than cost. Their focus on specific domains helped them to avoid body-shopping. Coupling specialization with customer focus they could develop superior products than horizontal firms. Narrow focus meant a small target segment which was countered by global expansion strategy which increased access to customers.

Customer focus:

1. staffed team with bankers in addition to technologists in light of the changing competitive context
2. moved from “account-centric” to a “customer-centric” system
3. created common service levels; parameterization helped in significantly reducing lead time and being more responsive to consumers’ needs
4. developed a multi-currency, multi-language system to be truly global

Through local support centres and higher level support centres, service periodic user meets, and their consulting services, they were abreast of changing customer preferences and used them as opportunities for knowledge sharing and reference generation.

The global expansion strategy is focussed on small banks in Asia-Pacific, Middle east, Caribbean and Easter Europe and gained share in these markets.

1. How did i-flex evolve as an organization in its journey?

i-flex’s strategic goal was to be a specialised IT services provider to financial services industry. Over the years, it has evolved from: