This is my 25th year with Aditya Birla Capital. I spent the early part of my career in the mutual funds business, building the business for ABC. I have since then, over the decades, steadily gained exposure to different aspects of the financial services business, from investments and insurance to the lending arm. A lot of my upskilling, apart from formal programs, has been a result of cross-business synergy at ABC – from simple conversations between colleagues to more official structures that provide an opportunity for us to bridge across business lines and understand the operations and product formulation strategies of other businesses units.

Something that has always given me a great deal of conviction is the company’s intense focus on capability-building among employees and partners alike. A perfect example of this is our Select Program for distributors across business lines. The objective is to enable our partners to go beyond just one business line and become wealth managers for multiple lines of business. Not only does this system help distributors cultivate a customer centric approach and broaden their offerings, it also augments their earnings while helping businesses retain them and enrich the value chain as a whole.

Another aspect of this is that our various businesses have been able to leverage the cross-business network that we are continually building. For instance, our health insurance business was relatively new 5-6 years ago, yet they were able to tap into the existing distributors for life insurance and mutual funds. These were performing distributors with a vast customer-base, so even a new business line was able to scale up at a significant pace. That’s not all, this program has been of great help to our sales employees because it cuts down the amount of time they would otherwise require for distributor acquisition, while also equipping them to develop product expertise across business lines, thereby opening up new growth opportunities for them.

To be at the helm of a practice like this is rewarding in a very unique way. I’ve been able to absorb nuanced insights of businesses across the Aditya Birla Capital group, with a keen understanding of our varied customer segments and in-depth visibility into how we can consistently add value for them. Not only do we make sure to keep evolving our offerings for the end-user, we are also always on-the-move when it comes to upskilling our own people. The kind of agility and adaptability one needs to drive such a program that encapsulates all the ABC businesses, is absolutely unmatched. I’m proud to say that our potent combination of brilliant talent and best-in-class learning avenues, takes our distributor engagement efforts to a different league altogether.

After all, we are ONE ABC, and here’s one of the ways we learn, build, serve and win as ONE.