Polaris commences organisational restructuring

Polaris Financial Technology is going in for an organisational restructuring and would soon finalise a consultant for this, company chairman Arun Jain said Thursday.

Polaris operates in three verticals - software services, products and cloud computing. The company board has approved the restructuring scheme.

"We are in the process of finalising the consultant to implement the organisational restructuring," Jain told IANS.

According to him, implementing the recommendations of the task force will be a major challenge as there will now be five chief executive officers in the company.

In January this year, based on the recommendations of Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Polaris Board authorised the company management to explore options that would provide an impetus for the next stage of growth and maximise shareholder value.

A task force, in turn, was set up with senior management officials that recommended restructuring the business into separate divisions - services and products- each having independent management teams and strategies aligned to their respective customers' needs.

As per the revised structure, Polaris is appointing five ceos for each distinct line of business across services and products for greater customer focus and agility.

The five ceos and their domain are: Jitin Goyal, ceo, Services; Manish Maakan, Global Transaction Banking; Jaideep Billa and Venkatesh Srinivasan, joint ceos, Core Banking, Treasury and Capital Markets and Pranav Pasricha, Insurance Products.

For the services business the task force recommended: (a) front-to-back integration of client-facing and delivery organisation, led by a chief client officer for each strategic account; (b) the division to have the ability to partner with any third-party solution provider and not be limited only to Polaris' product suite and (c) bring the business leadership closer to market.

In respect of the product division the task force's recommendations are: (a) focused research and development investments in each product line and increased solution architects footprint in markets (b) enable clients to leverage the power of the Intellect suite of products through a network of third-party system integrators and (c) provide dedicated client research facilities at FT 8012, Polaris' unique Financial Technology Design Center for the acceleration of modernisation initiatives.

Jain does not agree that new organisational structure is just internal rejig or redesignating senior management officials.

"It is a very big change in Polaris. Each business has a capacity to grow to $100 million. It will take around three months for the new set up to get set," Jain said.

He declined to comment about the possible next steps - demerging of the divisions into separate companies and inviting outside investments- and dismissed news reports about Polaris planning to hive off its services business to couple of IT majors as baseless.

In an earlier interaction with IANS Jain said the company is open for partners for its cloud, business, core banking solution and other product lines.