CXO Speak : Rashesh Shah, Chairman, Edelweiss Capital

Q What are some of the challenges inherent to your business?

Some of the key business challenges that we face are:

1. Dynamic nature of businesses — Business requirements keep changing and
keeping up with the same is imperative for growth

2. Risk Management — To understand risk across the enterprise and its effect on
each Line of Business (LOB).

3. Business continuity — Business must go on even in case of any eventualities.


4. Mobility — Moving from the traditional sit-at-office setups to a mobile force
enabled with applications on the go.

5. Execution capabilities — Merely setting up a system is not enough, execution
must be smooth and seamless, hence delivery mechanisms must be predefined and
tested.

QDoes IT act as a savior?

We believe IT can provide quick and immediate solutions to some of the
challenges the organization faces and actually helps in strengthening and
enhancing it in future. Data warehousing and data mining start playing a key
role once the client base becomes more broad-based and hence using IT to develop
CRM capabilities to manage clients in a more efficient manner becomes
imperative. IT can play an important role in designing solutions to also
cross-sell and up-sell to existing clients.

IT further helps in data integration across enterprise through seamless and
straight-through processing and by helping build a robust Business Continuity
Plan for the organization.

QHow do you motivate your IT staff to plan and carry out new deployments?

The Edelweiss senior management team encourages solutions by the Tech Team
in a way that go beyond merely fulfilling business requirements. We believe in
encouraging 'out-of-the-box' thinking and not be bogged down by 'build or buy'
considerations. In fact, our investment in technology has not scaled down even
in these times of recession and our focus continues to remain on deploying
cutting-edge technologies and systems to deliver higher performance.

QHas the current slowdown made you any wiser? Please share your learnings.

The last one year has been a critical time for us in terms of learnings. The
key focus has been on Liquidity, Costs and Risks to ensure that profit does not
get compromised. Some of the key learnings from the current economic slowdown
have been:

1. Revenue diversification: Focus out on businesses likely to be impacted by the
current environment and focus in on businesses expected to do well

2. Maintain a high level of capital with low gearing.

3. Keep continuous focus on risk management.

4. Continue investing in new businesses with an eye on future growth and bring
about incremental improvements in existing businesses.

5. Use technology to build efficiencies that positively impact cost control
measures.