Edelweiss- Ideas Create, Values Protect

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Edelweiss is one of India's leading Financial Services Groups, with operations that span more than forty different lines of business and subsidiaries.

Edelweiss's operations straddle the entire spectrum of financial services in the wholesale and retail market segments including Credit, Capital Markets & Asset Management, Commodities and Life Insurance.

India’s growth story is driven by a savings rate of about 32%, one of the youngest populations in the world and strong domestic consumption. With a net worth of over INR 28 Bn, Edelweiss is adequately capitalised to exploit the opportunities emerging from this robust economic growth. Edelweiss employs over 3200 professionals across 229 offices and branches spread across 115 cities of India.

Their core philosophy of ‘Ideas create, values protect’ is translated into an approach that is led by entrepreneurship and creativity, and protected by intellectual rigour, research and analysis.

The Approach of Edelweiss

Edelweiss is future-ready. The company has already made proactive business investments to service emerging customer needs on the one hand, and enhance stakeholder value on the other.

Diversification:
Over the years, Edelweiss progressively widened its services basket by moving into adjacent business spaces. Edelweiss was a purely capital market-focused player a few years ago; this business accounts for only about a third of its revenues today. As Edelweiss continues to broad base revenues, a rising proportion of growth will be derived from its Credit, Asset Management, Commodities and Insurance businesses.

Strong and liquid balance sheet:
Edelweiss possessed a balance sheet size at the end of FY 12 of over INR 145 Bn with a net worth of over INR 28 Bn. Edelweiss focuses on low gearing that provided the organisation with sufficient headroom to fund growth without comprising its balance sheet integrity.

Risk management:
Edelweiss’ risk mitigation practices are strengthened through timely investments in people, processes and IT capabilities on the one hand, and credible governance practices stewarded by an industry-renowned Board on the other.

People:
Edelweiss cultivates a culture of entrepreneurship and ownership among its people. The Group continues to invest in developing leadership and managerial talent across the organization through a four-tier system of identifying, nurturing and mentoring leaders. Fountainhead, Edelweiss’ state-of-the-art leadership centre in Alibaug, is among few such centres in the Indian Financial Services industry, promoting among others, a culture of training and development across the group.

Processes:
Edelweiss has undertaken a significant restructuring of its business to enhance operational efficiencies, dividing the organization into two operational clusters; Wholesale and Retail and SBU groupings that provide the scale and ergonomic growth. The company has carried out a visioning exercise with a roll-down across the organization to ensure clear articulation of its growth aspirations.

Execution expertise:
Edelweiss’ focus on error free and timely execution across businesses represent the core of its success. It possesses strong project teams that focus on processes, reviews and deliverables. Whenever necessary, it re-engineers processes and innovates state-of-the-art technology solutions that enhance efficiency.

Brand:
The Edelweiss brand is a much respected brand enjoying widespread recognition due to consistent investment in diverse set of brand building efforts spanning both conventional and unconventional channels. The ‘Ideas create, values protect Protect’ tagline underlines all branding efforts. A testament to the quality of the reputation being enjoyed by Edelweiss is the fact that Superbrands India has recognized Edelweiss as the Business Superbrand in the year 2011.

The Key People

Rashesh Shah - Chairman and CEO

Rashesh Shah, Chairman and CEO of the Edelweiss Group has over twenty years of experience in financial services in India. Prior to founding Edelweiss, he worked with ICICI, then India’s premier industrial development bank and today its largest private sector bank. In 1996, encouraged by the opportunity in the financial services sector as a result of economic reforms and liberalization in India, Rashesh founded Edelweiss with initial equity capital of INR 1 Cr (USD 250,000). Since then, Edelweiss has grown into a large diversified financial services house offering Credit, Capital Market, Asset Management, Housing Finance and Insurance products to a wide range of Institutional, Corporate and Individual customers. From 10 employees in 2000, Edelweiss is now 3,500 employees strong, with a net worth of over USD 500 Mn. 

Venkat Ramaswamy - Executive Director and Co-Head, Wholesale Capital 

An MBA from the University of Pittsburgh, United States of America and a Bachelor’s Degree holder in Electronics Engineering, Venkat Ramaswamy is widely recognized as one of India’s finest deal makers. Amongst his many responsibilities he also Co-Heads two of Edelweiss’ most strategic businesses – Wholesale Capital Markets and Wholesale Asset Management. 

After having worked in the Project Financing team of Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI) Ltd., then India’s premier project finance institution and today its largest private sector bank, and as a fund manager with Spartek Fund – India’s first PE fund – Venkat co-founded Edelweiss Financial Services Ltd. 

Since then he has been one of the driving forces in transforming what was once India’s first new age boutique investment bank to a leading diversified financial conglomerate in a span of just a decade and a half. 

Himanshu Kaji - Executive Director and Group COO

A Chartered Accountant with a Post Graduate Diploma in Securities Law, Himanshu Kaji brings to the table his diverse experience of over two decades in the areas of business strategy, risk, regulatory frameworks, process re-engineering and technology strategy and implementation across the financial services space. 

Himanshu oversees Finance, Operations, Technology, Governance, Administration, Investor Relations and Compliance at the Edelweiss Group. In addition to this, he is also in charge of Corporate Planning, which looks at Strategy Development and Execution for the Group. 

My Take on Edelweiss

Edelweiss is a great place to be, especially for budding young bankers! With string values, amazing client relationship and a fantastic work culture, Edelweiss is personally MY dream company!

References-
1) Edelweiss- Wikipedia
2) edelweissfin.com
3) Indian Banking Sector- Wikipedia
4) Investment Banking in India- Wikipedia

I am Possible- Well and Truly!

Classes outside classroom has always remained a dream in our system of education, but Dr Mandi has his own ways of dealing with things. 

With Rain pouring down heavily on the lush green never ending finely dressed grass lawn outside, the toy puzzle was no less than creativity to teach budding managers like us, in the simplest possible way; how things can turn out to be once we step out in an organization. 

 Activity: A puzzle was given to us  where we were supposed to separate a ring from a complex toy shown to us. 

 At first glance the task seemed impossible. The ring looked inseperable from the toy.

But there was more to it!!!

The purpose of the task was not to take us back to our childhood days, but to give us a glance of the managerial concepts applicable in an organization.

                                               MANAGEMENT CONCEPTS

Tendency to go for shortcuts:By Early analysis of the problem at hand,many of us reached to the consensus that the only solution is to cut the rope. That would have destroyed the toy for ever. In Organizations also, there is always a possibility to go for shortcut solutions. But with the increasing pace of change in technology and larger world, the need of an hour is "Out of the Box" thinking. Our World is shrinking very fast in terms of Globalization, and technology is on a changing spree every second. Only the one with best and innovative solution carries on.

Creative Solution and Need For Vision: The Solution for the puzzle should be one which would not destroy the toy, and would also be easy enough for others to follow.People started with hit and trial solutions.Some went into greater depth and studied the toy from various angles.

"Bounded Rationality" is the message that he was conveying to us through our attempts so far.. We had limited knowledge but wanted to solve the puzzle. This is what we will do after our MBA isn't it? Only those who possess greater innovation and out of box thinking will succeed in the competitive corporate world.

Working with constraints: The puzzle was designed in such a way that only at one particular position, we were able to separate the ring from the toy(our task).No Hit and trial worked.

Looking at the problem from different angles: Not every problem can be solved by predefined logical procedures.The task at hand was peculiar and one of its kind.The Technical,Conceptual and human skills were at work.

The Challenge Of motivation: Motivation is a human phychological character which contributes to person’s degree of commitment.In our activity,only few people were struggling with the activity till the end and others lost hope. Our professor Dr. Mandi behaved as Theory X manager in the activity.He motivated people and influenced people throughout.

Finally it was not us, but a worker who came and solved the puzzle within no time. The Solution looked very simple. And thereafter everybody was able to solve the puzzle as the trick was known in open. In Real life scenarios also,Innovation dies very soon. We need to stay on our toes, or else others might stamp on ours.

The 3 Buddhist Monks

How to start, what to write is what i am wondering now, coz as always the revelation of insightful realization is difficult to be penned down. But still let me make an attempt.


In today's class we saw a short animated Chinese film on “Three Monks”.  Now surely you must be wondering what it has to do with organizational structure and behaviour. Just hold on to your eagerness for a little while and have a glimpse of the masterpiece "The three buddhist priests" by Shanghai animation film studio.

STORY IN BRIEF: 

A young monk lives a simple life in a temple on top of a hill. He has one daily task of hauling two buckets of water up the hill. He tries to share the job with another monk, but the carry pole is only long enough for one bucket. The arrival of a third monk prompts everyone to expect that someone else will take on the chore. Consequently, no one fetches water though everybody is thirsty. One night, a rat comes to scrounge and accidentally knocks the candle holder, leading to a devastating fire in the temple. The three monks finally unite together and make a concerted effort to put out the fire. Since then they understand the old saying "unity is strength" and begin to live a harmonious life. The temple never lacks water again 

LEARNINGS:

Here i would like to pick up certain instances from the film and talk about them:

1: Variety and differences: all the 3 monks were of different sizes, shapes, and nature. the same thing could be linked to organizations, where every employee is one of its kind, and the manager needs to manage them irrespective of the disparities.

2: Joint work: as soon as the second monk came to the temple, the 1st monk inherently partnered him for the work. this shows the positive trait of working in tandem that we all humans possess.

3: Team conflict: even though they started working together, but soon enough there was a conflict between the 2 regarding their work. thus this again brings us to the fact that humans have an innate tendency to undergo conflicts when asked to work in teams.

4: Solving conflict: conflicts will always be a part of our lives, but running away from them is not the solution. We should encourage conflicts to come up with better ways to deal with them. Thats what the monk did when he took a scale to find out the mid point of the stick.

5: Lack of accountability : with the entry of the 3rd monk all of them started to run away from their duties. this happened because there was no clear cut defined role for them. the same thing may happen in an organization which has many members but not well defined set of goals to keep them focussed.

6: Crisis breeds efficiency and effectiveness: when the fire happens and trouble looms, all the 3 monks starts to work in tandem. an effective team will take precautionary measures rather than work when things turn worse.

  7: Synergised work - efficient work: the last part shows the worker devising a strategy where each of them works equally to make the process efficient and reduce individual work to almost nil.

 - the solution is innovative

 - the solution is sympathetic with the changing team dynamics and size

 - the solution is a revolutionary one

 - the solutions envisions clearly defined roles for individual worker

 - the solution involves 'SYNERGY'

8: Productivity: the solution was a great step towards enhancing and improving the productivity of work by multifolds. With every new situation the productivity(o/p / i/p) increased exponentially leading to almost zero efforts from each of the workers in the final case with maximum efficiency and effectiveness. 

TAKE AWAY:  i am sure all your doubts have been cleared regarding how effectiveness of education can be improved by innovation. That's how our curriculum at NITIE goes, strongly handheld by our very own  Dr MANDI.