We are developing set of offerings targeted at portfolio and PE firms: Happiest Minds

At the event organized by Happiest Minds, Joseph Anantharaju, Co-Chairman & CEO, thanked Ashok Soota and the Board for the trust they have placed. He said: "I am very confident of continuing to deliver industry-leading growth based on the quality of our leadership and talent, the transformational initiatives we have initiated, and the strong customer relationships we have developed over the last 14 years. As Ashok mentioned, I would like to give further details about how we are ‘delivering transformation with innovation, integration & industry expertise’."

The change announced in the apex organizational structure is the first step in building a strong organization for the future. The Executive Board (EB) will continue in its current form and provide continuity, while we use this year to transition to a new look EB consisting of next-generation leaders to help us meet our goal of long-term profitable growth for the next decade. We would also need to integrate the organizations from the two companies that we acquired earlier this year. 

Over the last few days, I have been talking to leaders from Happiest Minds, PureSoftware and Aureus to understand their aspirations and forge an integrated organization structure that I target to announce in the next 6-8 weeks. 

As many of you know, Private Equity (PE) firms have been increasing in number and size over the last few years. They have been making larger investments across a wider range of industries, while getting operationally involved and directing not only strategy, but also operational execution at their portfolio companies. 

Happiest Minds has always had customers that were owned by PE firms, but the % of customers and our revenues from these customers has increased significantly. Earlier, we had engaged with these firms in an ad-hoc and tactical manner. Given the potential of this channel, we would like to engage in a more strategic manner and have a senior leader take responsibility for crafting and executing this strategy. 

We are developing a set of offerings that are not only targeted at the portfolio companies, but also at the PE firms. We would like to move more upstream and help PE firms in carrying out due diligence of their acquisition candidates and helping them with a post-acquisition roadmap. We are developing tools and frameworks that will accelerate this process. 

The first step would be to leverage our existing customers and the good work we are doing to get introductions and get connected with the PE firms that own these customers. We will follow that up with a curated list of firms where we have connections or a compelling value proposition. 

Our offerings to the portfolio companies would include security risk assessment and remediation, modernization and management of their tech debt, consulting and execution on innovation strategies, help with cost take-out, leveraging GenAI, integration of multiple acquired entities, etc. 

Over the last 13-14 years, we have acquired many logos of consequences and effectively deployed our ‘land and expand’ strategy. This has resulted in the average revenue per customer consistently increasing resulting in many accounts that are $2-3M in size; in addition to a few customers that are $5M and $10 customers. We would like to take this strategy to the next level and move some of these customers into the $20M range and create many more $5 and $10M accounts. 

As part of this strategy, we will be investing in dedicated, seasoned Client Partners to bring focus and elevate conversations, creating customer-specific solutions, aligning incentives and responsibilities across several functions, and giving these sets of accounts prioritized focus and treatment. Our decision to create a dedicated NN sales team has freed up sales bandwidth and allowed us to specialize the EE/EN sales team to enable this strategy.

Many of you have been tracking and reporting on the proliferation of Global Capability Centers (GCCs) over the last couple of years. While we have been engaged with GCCs since our inception, the increased number and size make this an attractive segment for Happiest Minds to focus on. Our offerings and value proposition will vary based on the stage and maturity of the GCC. 

For companies that are contemplating a GCC, we would help them understand the opportunity, risk, legal and compliance needs, scale requirements, and talent needs to craft an appropriate strategy and facilitate their entry directly or through Happiest Minds. For GCCs that have been around for an extended period, we would like to focus on enhancing their effectiveness, aiding their innovation strategies by leveraging GenAI and Automation, modernize technology landscape and leverage data to become more core in their company’s landscape

We are very excited by the prospects and the potential of the award-winning Arttha Banking platform and propose to create a separate P&L for this platform, along with the investments required to actualize this potential. We are taking a two-pronged approach here. The first prong is targeting the Indian market by adding functionalities, including integrations and regulatory compliance that are specific to the Indian market and having a focused GTM that includes associated offerings that have Arttha at their core. 

We are also looking to expand the international market presence beyond our current Southeast Asia and Africa markets into Europe and North America by investing in features and functionalities for these markets, developing alliances and partnerships to enhance the value proposition and tap into the necessity for these banks to offer a customer experience that is more digital and personalized that current banking products are not able to offer.