Ritu Jha-
Entrepreneurs, chartered accountants and corporate leaders from various sectors shared insights on doing cross-border business, their success as well as challenges at an event hosted by the ICAI San Francisco Bay Area-based chapter, held February 23 in Los Altos, California. The theme for the event? “Igniting Trade and Innovation in the US-India Corridor.”
Panelists Madhu Ranganathan, CFO of OpenText; CA Avinash Ramkumar, partner at Uniqus Consultech; Dr. Chock Karuppaiah, CTO at Ohmium; and Rakesh Jha, Executive Director of ICICI Bank, shared their journey and how US-India business can be made sustainable. The session was moderated by CA Nilesh Shah of the ICAI San Francisco Chapter.
Ranganathan, also a board member of Akamai Technologies, spoke on how chartered accountants helped shape her journey. She said as a rank-holder CA, when she moved to the US from India, her credentials weren’t given value here, so she did an MBA too. “But it was really that CA in me that brought out 10,000 different ways of how I could work and excel and succeed,” Ranganathan said.
For Ramkumar, who has worked with Deloitte and KPMG, said his humble beginnings started in India, and he belongs to a family of accountants. “My grandfather was an accountant and my dad is a CA. I finished my CA in 2001 after that, I. That’s when I joined KPMG in 2002. For 11 years I was there before moving to the US and I realized that no one cared that I was a partner at a firm in India,” Ramkumar said.
He added, “The CA fraternity in the US laid a good ground for me to showcase my experience. When I came here, I was brought down to the level of a senior manager at a firm and then made it to a partner. For the last eight years, I was a partner there. I spent 22 years with the firm in both India and here. I’ve recently joined a startup called Uniqus Consultech.”
Dr. Karuppaiah, CTO at Ohmium, says he shares the same attachment of a CA to the ICAI. Talking about Ohmium, Karuppaiah said, “Ohmium is a four-year-old startup with a lab in Fremont. Most of our development team is in India. We design, develop, and manufacture equipment that takes in renewable energy and splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. We are going after the hardware-based sector, like steel manufacturing, ammonia synthesis, cement, and glass. These are all the industrial applications we’ll be replacing with hydrogen, with green hydrogen. The model is a modular system that will be deployed across the board.”
ICICI Bank’s Jha lauded the role of CAs in business. “The kind of expertise and commitment that I have observed in CAs throughout my working life is unparalleled, “said Jha, an alumnus of IIT, Delhi and IIM, Lucknow who has been working with the bank for past 28 years.
He said overseas business is an important part of ICICI Bank’s overall strategy. “Our core strength is all things linked to India. That’s what we are focusing on as a bank and with the presence that we have in the US, we can pretty much do all the business on the corporate side,” added Jha. On the retail side, ICICI Bank offers remittances, asset products in India and services related to India banking for NRIs.
Moderator Nilesh Shah, CA asked about how banks and entrepreneurs see global presence.
Dr. Chock Karuppaiah, founder of Ohmium, said that few of them in the leadership came from the previous company where they had India experience as well. “The youth factory of the world is in India. We took the technology from here, the technical skills from there, and married the two and started the company,” Dr.Karuppaiah said on the US-India business.
Another speaker at the panel, CA Avinash Ramkumar presented a different picture and raised some objections. “One of the big red flags that I take offense to is when people look at India as just an outsourcing option. This may be true for the IT industry but we are different and highly skilled. I was part of the Big Four for 22 years, that is how I used to be rated. How can you be judgmental about India in terms of getting the work done? We are not going to shy away from thick books. We should give the resources to people, like someone sitting in India, to read us GAAP and sign off on an ACC registration statement. That was our concept when he started operations. That’s what we are doing right now. The US-India corridor for us is far more expanded and much broader. We want to create that and to some extent, the CA institute has to help us and we are here to do the same. We need the talent pool. We also need to be able to work with everyone to show that this is possible.”
Ranganathan believes that the shift in perspective towards India has already begun. “The shift in thinking about India as an outsourcing destination has already begun manifesting. That shift happened for me in the last several years and as my leadership stature grew, I made it a point to tell the team members in India that they need to be on the global platform. I think the paradigm shift from making the manager or the team successful in Australia or the US or the UK, to making the product and the company successful. The world is going to take a little bit more time to shift. But if there was a moment where we’d all stand up and say, we are citizens of two countries, it’s absolutely a proud moment to say, I’m a citizen of India.”
Sharing their success stories and how to execute to build the US-India bridge, Dr. Karuppaiah believes the work gets smoother if you’re able to get a leadership team who have seen both sides of the aisle – US and India.
Giving an example he said like one of their chief operating officers used to be part of Cypress Semiconductor in the US, he’s now running the organization in India. He has seen both sides. However, he said that even as you develop these teams, you have a mental model of what’s expected, product engineering or process engineering, but the team that you are hiring hasn’t gone through that. So, you need to get an understanding of what they know and what we need to train them to take initiative, making the product, and the business successful.
During the event, Dr Rahul Walawalkar, President, India Energy Storage Alliance presented his project. Vivek Anand, Vice Consul in San Francisco was a special guest along with the city of Fremont Mayor Lily Mei and Raj Salwan, Councilmember, District 5.
Vish Arunachalam founder, chairman, and director of ICAI San Francisco chapter along with Sudha Michel, chairperson announced the new ICAI Management Committee of the San Francisco Chapter: Vikram Deshpande, Vice Chairperson; Meena Viswanathan, Treasurer; Manisha Anarkat, Secretary; Nilesh Shah, Jt. Secretary; Vish Arunachalam, Director; Neeraj Bhatia, Director; Ramamoorthy KC, Director; Vineet Bhatia, Director and Madhu Ranganathan as advisor.
During the event, the San Francisco Chapter of ICAI also announced that Zoho Corporation had become the event sponsor.
Sudha Michel, chairperson ICAI-SF chapter, said, “The San Francisco Chapter endeavors to having events that create bridges in the US-India corridor. In this event, we saw a paradigm shift on what corporations are seeking from India – from cost advantage to an empowered and highly skilled talent pool.”
