What is common between Tesla, LinkedIn, and YouTube? Apart from being wildly successful companies in their own right, all three companies were created by former PayPal employees and founders. 

PayPal was originally a money-transfer service offered by Confinity, a company founded by Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Luke Nosek. The company was acquired by X.com in 1999, and after a few years, the latter was renamed PayPal and sold to eBay in 2002. Within four years of this transition, 12 of the first 50 employees left, however, they remained connected socially and businesswise. Over time, a number of them partnered together to form new companies and ventures. Some of these ventures became very successful and prolific. In 2007, Fortune Magazine carried an article and coined the phrase – PayPal Mafia – it was accompanied by a photo of these former PayPal employees in gangster attire. These founders are now the most influential and wealthiest people in Silicon Valley.

Cut to India, Genpact has produced some of the most influential analytics leaders that we have today. Genpact Mafia, if you will.

Yesterday’s Genpact employees, today’s analytics leaders

Bermuda-headquartered Genpact is a global professional services firm which employs over 100,000 people. It was established as a part of General Electric in 1997 before being spun off as a separate entity called GE Capital International Services (GECIS) in New Delhi. Headed by Pramod Bhasin, the company offers business process outsourcing solutions to GE’s businesses. 

Genpact is widely considered a pioneer of business process outsourcing. By 2005, GECIS became an independent company and changed its name to Genpact. Within two years, it became a publicly-traded company and since then, the company has diversified to offer AI-based services, building proprietary APIs and developing an open architecture to include all of its intellectual property and that of other providers. NV “Tiger” Tyagarajan is the current CEO and president of the company.

Genpact housed and nurtured some of the best talents in analytics who have now gone on to hold some key positions in leading organisations.

RB Rajendar, the current head of analytics – India, Citi Solutions, was one of the initial employees of GECIS. He joined the company in May 1998 as the assistant manager and was instrumental in setting up the analytics department of the company in India. He was associated with the company for over three years and rose to the position of Assistant Vice President before joining HSBC.

Rohit Tandon, the Global AI & Analytics Services Leader, Deloitte, joined GECIS in 1999 as the VP – Business Development, before diversifying into other roles within GE. He joined Genpact back again in 2006 as SVP and Business Leader- Analytics for two years. He had his third stint at the organisation in 2016 as the SVP and Analytics Business Leader, where again he spent over two years.

Between 2002 and 2010, Namit Sharma worked as the Vice President at Genpact, leading a 550-member analytics and research team working across retail banking, credit cards, auto finance, brokerage, and e-commerce. He is now the Vice President & Head of Global Delivery Center for Analytics, India at FICO.

Shuvajit Basu joined as the Delinquency & Risk Strategy Lead at GECIS in 2002. He is currently the VP and Head of Data Science at Tata Group.

Satyamoy Chatterjee, executive vice president at Analytiica Datalab, is a data science professional with an experience of 20 years. His association with Genpact dates back to 2003 when he joined the company as a Consultant after completing an MS course from Wichita State University. He worked there for three years before joining Citibank and subsequently assuming his current role at Analytiica Datalab.

As an Analytics Manager at GECIS in 2003, Arnab Chakraborty was instrumental in building the Marketing Analytics Center of Excellence (CoE) for GE Commercial Finance. He is currently the Senior Managing Director – Applied Intelligence North America Lead for Accenture AI.

Paritosh Anand is the Senior Vice President – Digital Platforms at Reliance Industries Limited, but he started his career with Genpact as a consultant in 2003.

Like Paritosh, Amit Kalra too began his professional career in 2003 with GECIS in Market Research. He is currently working with Swiss Re as Managing Director, Head Global Business Solution Centres India.

Beginning her professional career as an assistant system analyst at TCS, Mathangi Sri joined Genpact in 2005 as a consultant and worked there for over two years. Since then, Mathangi has worked in organisations like HSBC, Citibank, PhonePe, and Gojek, before joining her current company Yubi (earlier called CredAvenue) as the chief data officer.

Amit Khanna is currently a Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He worked with Genpact in 2005 as the Service delivery lead ( Customer & Marketing Analytics) for over two years.

Vice President – Global Analytics at Concentrix, Hari Saravanabhavan, is an analytics leader with an experience of 25 years, working with companies like Cognizant, IBM, and Airtel. Saravanabhavan worked at Genpact between 2006 and 2008 as the assistant vice president – Retail, CPG, and Telecom analytics. At Genpact, he oversaw the deployment and delivery of analytics models and developed plans for innovative analytics interventions.

Thomas Jacob Kollenkeril joined as a consultant in 2006, rising and was the Global Operating Lead at the time of leaving the organisation in 2020. He is currently the Senior Director (Analytics) at Biocon Group.

Ram Kumar joined Genpact in 2006 as a Consultant and worked there for over two years. He rejoined the organisation in 2009 as a Manager and worked for almost seven years this time. He is now the Senior Director & Head, Data Sciences at Snapdeal.

Ishu Jain is the Head of Central Analytics at Swiggy, where she heads a team of 100 plus data scientists/analysts across central functions like delivery network optimization, customer segmentation, loyalty, traffic and acquisition. Ishu joined  Genpact as a consultant in 2006.

Training ground for future entrepreneurs

Pankaj Kulshreshtha joined GECIS as the Vice President – Analytics, in 1998. He has worked with other GE subsidiaries before coming back to Genpact as SVP & Business Leader – Analytics & Research. After a six-year stint, he went on to establish Scienaptic Systems, an AI-based Credit platform, in 2014.

Founded in 2011, BRIDGEi2i enables data-driven digital transformation for its clients, using a combination of data engineering, analytics, proprietary AI and other consulting services. In 2021, the company was acquired by Accenture. The acquisition added over 800 professionals to Accenture’s Applied Intelligence practice. Interestingly, one of the co-founders of BRIDGEi2i is Prithvijit Roy. Roy was one of the earliest employees of GECIS in 1999, where he worked as the assistant vice president, before leaving in 2005 to join HP.

Like Roy, Sayandeb Banerjee joined GECIS in 1999 as a manager. He worked at GECIS before joining GE Money in 2003. Currently, he is the co-founder and CEO of TheMathCompany, a company that helps enterprises build and maintain in-house analytics centres. He is also the co-founder/CEO of co.dx.

Sanjeev Mishra is the CEO and co-founder of Convergytics Solutions Pvt. Ltd that offers analytics solutions to Retail, CPG, Telecom, Technology & Media companies. He was associated with GECIS between 2001 and 2003.

Sarita Digumarti is the co-founder of Jigsaw Academy, an edtech firm that offers courses in AI and analytics. GECIS was one of the first organisations she worked with at the beginning of her career. In 2004, started as an assistant manager and rose through the ranks to become Assistant VP.

Apart from these, Genpact alumni have gone on to establish companies like Transitials, eWandzDigital Services, Stratbeans Consulting Private Ltd, and Stylofie, among others.