The Silicon Review ^Asia

We have become a brand that SMEs prefer, a landmark for the common to refer and a decisive career for many: Jagdish Iyer

There is such an abundance of diverse services and products on the market today that industries have become aggressively competitive. Companies need to put in extra effort and resources in order to manage every aspect of business and keep it stable – from ensuring a solid budget, through hiring the most experienced talents to manage internal and external stakeholders.

Wanting to increase revenues and expand, businesses aim to attract new customers and partners while retaining their existing ones.

In light of the above mentioned, we are thrilled to present ICAN BPO Pvt Ltd – a full-service solutions provider with deep domain expertise in the areas of customer acquisition and retention across verticals. ICAN leverages its proprietary ICARE approach and hand holds its clients through the entire life cycle of customer acquisition, engagement and retention. The company’s superior de-risked execution model, extensive use of technology and proprietary customer behavior predictive algorithms are leveraged into a powerful ROI enhancing formula for its clients.

The firm truly lives by its mission of ‘Enabling Success’ for its clients. This has empowered ICAN to become a dominant player in the SME segment in a short span of nine years.

ICAN is headquartered in Thane, Maharashtra. It has additional offices in New Jersey (Business office) and Philadelphia (Delivery Office).

Interview Excerpt: Jagdish Iyer, President/Group CEO

Rewind: Getting off the Ground

Bootstrapped by three deeply experienced IT professionals – Jagdish Iyer (Group CEO and President), Nitin Chacko (Managing Director & SBU Head), Vinod Rao (Sr. Vice President) and, who were later on joined by Adarsh Shetty (Sr. Vice President), ICAN came into existence in 2009. Over the years, know-how of this young team has been instrumental in understanding the dynamics of SMEs. In addition, since the team has strong experience of working with large international corporates, ICAN has carved an extremely professional outfit, which in turn significantly facilitates the company to be extremely flexible. While engaging with large outsourcing companies, needless to say, SMEs don’t even get an opportunity to discuss their goals and targets with the senior management, and this is where ICAN becomes impeccable. The topline management personnel, who involve in every aspect of the company’s business on a daily basis, directly attend clients and ensure their hands-on contributions in every project, and this methodology has proven highly effective while combating versatile challenges on behalf of its clients. Indeed, while approaching challenges, it believes in not having a mantra at all.

Having partnered with an entire gamut of trusted digital marketing companies across the world, which leverage every possible digital channel for marketing including Email Marketing, Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC), Display Advertising, Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Affiliate Marketing, in addition to utilizing cross-sales, ICAN makes it look easy while driving huge volumes of internet and mobile-based traffic for its clients. Once the company comprehends the prospects, it employs a large pool of highly trained & experienced resources across geographies that are capable of communicating with prospects & customers regardless of technology/ IP/telecom platforms to close deals for its clients. On demand, it also kicks in its IFAP services including transaction processing, acquiring merchant account and managing the backend for the same. “To further ease the acquisition process, we bring to bear our large investments in cutting-edge technology infrastructure and platform agnostic application development expertise, alongside employing a bulk of highly qualified technologists who help clients in harvesting variety of technology channels.”

Services Offered by ICAN: A Much Needed Solution

1. ICARE – Customer Acquisition Engagement and Retention

• Soup to Nuts CRM partner – ICAN provides its clients with a comprehensive suite of services encompassing the entire Customer Relationship Management (CRM) lifecycle – from customer targeting and segmentation to customer acquisition leading on to continued engagement resulting in superior retention. We provide this in both the B2C and in the B2B spaces depending on the industry and the clients we serve.
• Scalability across Platforms and Geographies – ICAN employs a large pool of highly trained and experienced resources across geographies capable of communicating with prospects and customers regardless of technology/IP/telecom platforms. Our acclaimed measurement tools ensure that our clients are in most cases able to meet and exceed not just sales and retention targets but also do it in the most ROI efficient manner possible. We provide 24x7 support across channels including telephony, chat/IM and email. For many of our clients, we have transformed customer support into a line function as opposed to being a mere cost center.
• Continued Investments in Technology – One of our key differentiators is the ability to handle complexity - both operational and technology wise. ICAN brings to bear its large investments in cutting-edge technology infrastructure and platform agnostic application development expertise. We employ a large staff of highly qualified technologists that helps us provide our clients with the choice of creating or harvesting technology channels to acquire, retain and engage customers.

“We believe reaching out to customers and encouraging product and/or service usage. In our experience, this results in significant reduction in customer attrition and provides an additional reference channel for further customer acquisitions. Our unique measurement tools provide our clients clear visibility into the ROI on such activities.”

2. IFAP – Finance & Accounting Practice

ICAN provides a bouquet of XBRL/Edgar/Typesetting solutions for all your filing needs (6K’s, 8K’s, 10Q’s, 10K’s, Section 16 Forms (3, 4, 5), Proxy Statement (DEF 14A’s), Registration Statement (S1’s), Form D's, 20-F’s, Risk Returns & more) in conformation with SEC guidelines. Following are the services on offer:

• Edgarization (Conversion of your Word, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, Quark, Pagemaker documents to SEC EDGAR format).
• Detailed Notes tagging. (XBRL)
• Risk/Return documents for Mutual Funds
• Ability to prepare XBRL for Foreign filers
• Tagging based on IFRS Taxonomy.
• Filing on SEC
• Self-filing solutions

At ICAN, we also provide services for all your Bookkeeping, Accounting needs. We help organizations in creating their books from scratch, updating them regularly & maintaining them full-time. We offer weekly, Bi-weekly, monthly or yearly Accounting and bookkeeping including Regulatory Reporting services (XBRL). Our Services covers all aspects of accounting and bookkeeping, including:

• Entry of transactions
• Journal Entry
• General Ledger
• Assets /Equipment Ledgers
• Expenses Ledger
• Accounts Receivables
• Accounts Payables
• Ageing Report & Summaries
• Bank Reconciliation
• Financial Statements Preparation
• Trial Balance
• Income Statement (Profit & Loss)
• Balance-sheet
• Cash Flow Statement

3. IFIN – Consumer Lending Practice

ICAN facilitates the provision of personal loans to retail borrowers in North America and the UK.

“We provide a soup to nuts small ticket lending solution spanning from loan generation/origination to underwriting to disbursal to customer service to collections. We are able to provide these services as an entire bouquet or in pieces and serve our clients in a variety of highly flexible and customized commercial models.”

4. iApps – Solutions

ICAN brings to bear its varied experience on leveraging technology in its various businesses as a consulting offering to its clients. “Our expertise spans across technology platforms and devices. The solutions we design and execute for our clients are generally turn-key in nature and usually include both buy and build elements in their construction.”

ICAN has a variety of proprietary transactional platforms that it makes available to its clients on an optional basis. These include:

• Custom designed CRM platforms for Loyalty Programs
• Proprietary Electronic Payment Processing Platforms
• IDAMS – The ICAN Digital Asset Management Suite of tools

Meet The CEO: A Brief Background

Jagdish Iyer, President/Group CEO: Jagdish has over 22 years of experience across industries in various senior and executive management capacities. He is a successful entrepreneur with experience in starting up and rapidly growing businesses. In 2003, he co-founded Adventity (www.adventity.com), a full-service BPO/KPO company and grew that to a 4000 plus people global business in 5 years and later became part of the Sutherland Global Services (Thane) offices handling Mortgages, Airlines and Ticketing services. Prior to that, he was working in the IT services industry in the US that included among others a stint with Infosys Technologies (www.infosys.com). He started his career as an investment banker in India and also worked for Reuters PLC in the Asia Pacific region.

"We believe in partner relationship than vendor client type model and are willing to work with start-ups on profit share."