Today, technology has proven invaluable in managing specialized services and complex financial tasks across various industries. Top companies utilize it to provide customer satisfaction. One such company is EQ India, which offers financial technology services to the EQ Group’s global clients. Recently, it has been recognized as a Top Employer for its HR practices in the UK, US, and India.
Offshore Unit of EQ Group
The EQ Group is a UK-based company and the leading provider of professional shareholder, pension, and remediation services in the UK and the second largest in the US. Based in Bangalore, EQ India serves as the offshore unit of the EQ Group. It operates with EQ’s entities in the UK, US, Netherlands and Poland.
Founded in 2014, it handles back-office tasks for the EQ Group and works with 49% of FTSE 100 companies and 35% of S&P 500 firms. The company operates out of Chennai and Bangalore with around 1,800 employees, comprising more than a quarter of EQ’s global workforce. A pioneer in using technology to enhance client and end-customer experience, it helps serve 36 million shareholders worldwide.
Core Values it Thrives On
EQ India has adopted the EQ Group’s core values of commercial, collaboration, improvement, and trust. Trust forms the foundation of the company’s services in the sensitive and specialized field of global financial operations. For the company’s success, collaboration plays a crucial role as the teams are spread across countries. It understands and works on constant improvement towards growth. Being a commercial organization ensures customer success and profitability. The teams of EQ India are taught to adhere to these values while carrying out their daily responsibilities and in their interactions with colleagues worldwide.
Overcoming Hurdles
The share registry industry is highly specialized, and finding individuals with the expertise of domain and technical knowledge is more demanding. EQ India addressed this challenge by recruiting promising individuals and transforming them into specialists through comprehensive training programs. The senior management supports continuous learning through certifications, online training modules, and even bringing in trainers from the US and UK. Internal promotions are prioritized, ensuring a steady pool of loyal, experienced talent to fuel growth and serve as internal ambassadors.
Continuous Growth and Success
In recent years, EQ India has experienced significant growth. It aims to expand by more than 20% each year in the coming years. This growth will lead to the company constituting 50% of the EQ Group’s global workforce. Apart from core operations, it will also focus on innovation and technology transformation.
Anand Ramakrishnan, the Managing Director of EQ India, and his team have been focused on improving the company’s capabilities. They aim to move beyond simply replicating processes and instead evolve into Centers of Excellence (CoE). These CoEs will drive value for the EQ Group. This has helped the Group offshore modules of work rather than just specific processes, which has immensely aided EQ India’s growth.
Mr. Anand credits the robust talent strategy for the company’s continuous growth. The principles that the company adopted, like focusing on employee engagement, diversity, encouraging innovation, and having open and transparent communication across the company, also contributed to its growth. He believes that these principles and the company’s values tie all colleagues across countries together, leading to an ability to contribute quickly and seamlessly in multicultural environments. He also emphasizes the importance of having a razor-sharp focus on customers and building a customer-centric organization. With the advancement of AI across industries, GCCs have to upskill, reskill, and recruit for the technology and use it, with context and caution in mind.
Company Culture
EQ India’s leadership team has a strong awareness that softer and intangible factors create a good workspace. To keep morale and engagement high, senior management pays careful attention to employee satisfaction. Initiatives like acting quickly on the anonymous monthly employee feedback from the Peakon tool and offering well-being programs are continuously identified and followed through. The leadership team takes the initiative to personally mentor the employees, build customized career paths, and upskill the framework so the young team members can achieve the highest potential.
At EQ India, diversity is an important tenet so every employee can feel valued and heard. The country’s varied cultural identities are celebrated through numerous festivals and events. Forty percent of the company’s teams are women, and programs such as return-to-work for new mothers are in place too, making it a fair and equal-opportunity employer.
Leading Through Empowerment
Mr. Anand’s leadership philosophy revolves around empowering his teams. All leaders, managers, and team members are encouraged to collectively advance the vision. They are also encouraged to tap into their individual strengths and ingenuity. This approach ensures collective success, rather than individual glory. Openness to new ideas throughout the company, especially among leaders, is also important to establish a strong culture of innovation. Knowing that managers support them when they experiment and fail provides a fertile ground for creativity to flourish. Leaders of a pioneering set-up must always be prepared to guide the team through anticipated and unforeseen challenges.
Technological Advancements
The Finance Shared Services CoE has successfully unified company-wide finance processes onto a single platform as a significant step in the group’s global digital transformation. Core shareholder operations from the USA have been moved here, freeing up the onshore offices to build deeper relationships with clients. EQ India follows a measured approach while achieving these advancements. The EQ Group takes a balanced stance toward digitization in the larger context of its sensitive role as a financial custodian.
Mr. Anand and his team have been mindful not to rush into adopting or implementing today’s technologies because others are using them. Any platform or solution has to go through rigorous evaluation to ensure it will not compromise the sensitive financial and personal data the company handles. Additionally, an in-house solution should align with the organization’s core values.
Company’s Plans for Future
EQ India continues to work on the concept of GCC 4.0 while fulfilling the EQ Group’s goals. It is working on various group initiatives, including digitization, self-service, data management, enterprise architecture, data management, process automation, and many other such group initiatives. Increasing digitization will unlock data for analytics-led decision-making for the entire organization. India’s CoEs are being set up for more global functions, like procurement and project management. The company is also a key player in the group’s journey to the cloud.
Similar to all corporations, whether local or global, GCCs must collaborate with broader Indian ecosystems, such as academia and universities. This collaboration aims to create symbiotic relationships that combine the best from the HQ’s global practices and India’s talent. GCCs can reach out to local community leaders and NGOs to participate in social impact initiatives, so employees and communities can contribute meaningfully. EQ India is also actively involved in building local schools and contributing to other social causes.
