Our strategy is to build businesses that will lead the areas they operate in, says Crisil CEO

There are considerable opportunities around and we need to be smart and grab the rising share of wallet across business areas. The second is to build a company that is geared for the future. This entails creation of intellectual property (IP), as that is what is going to get value. For me, Crisil’s core IP is its 4,200 employees. The focus is on synchronising our thought process, mindset and intellect, to ensure that we tap the available opportunities well and keep growing.

It could be products, solutions, unique data sets, among other things. Crisil sits atop considerable information and intelligence. To differentiate from competition and drive customer acquisition, we need proprietary data, products and domain-led solutions.

The acquisition of Greenwich in 2020 and Coalition in 2012 are examples of this. Greenwich does a lot of customer surveys while Coalition also looks at quantitative share of wallets. Combining them has meant customers are now able to view the wallet share of a particular product, geography, or segment and gauge the trend. They are also able to understand the reason for the trend and the ways to course-correct, if needed. That was not possible before the acquisitions when Crisil’s ambit was limited to the quantitative aspect.

Take the case of the ground shift for businesses following the Covid-19 pandemic in India. Crisil typically undertakes macro research for companies. We realised that larger cities and some rural pockets were more impacted compared to the rest of the country. Client queries was around what translated to in business terms. This led us to create dashboards for micro segmentation — at the district level, and across products, to enable clients take decisions. This product has now become a key reference point for such decision making. We have in-house data as well as those mined from external sources.

Our strategy is to build businesses that are going to drive the areas they are operating in. For instance, if we are looking at global benchmarking for institutions, then in that space, we need to be the leader, we need to have a material market share, and we need to make a difference to our clients. We would want to be in spaces where we are making a difference, creating an impact, where our clients see and get value. 

Technology has changed considerably in the past few years — cloud is a great example. Customer demand is also shifting with the surge in digitalisation. Today, most of the information is consumed via smartphones and iPads, and not necessarily through laptops. User interfaces have also changed because of the demand for faster, real-time need for information. Today, loan processing takes only a few minutes.

So, it is imperative to pivot the entire organisation and skillsets, as it were, towards futuristic technologies. That needs considerable investments — in hardware, software and people.

Crisil will have to disrupt, not get disrupted, which means we will have to be future-ready always. Thinking through what is likely to happen and coming up with solutions is our default mode.

For India to grow, infrastructure investments are necessary, and funds for that will largely come from the corporate bond market. This market is on the cusp of big growth. The pandemic did slam the brakes on growth, but only temporarily. The geopolitical tensions will also have their impact. However, in the longer run, the corporate bond market will pick up.

Last year, after studying global standards, we built a framework suitable for India and benchmarked with some of the best-in-class available globally. We created scorecards for benchmarking companies on ESG standards, based on publicly available information — either on the website, balance sheet or the larger public domain. We tried to create a consistent way of looking at the data to score the companies. From 225 companies last year, we have 586 companies this year.

As per SEBI’s requirement for listed companies, 1,000 of them will have to disclose their business responsibility and sustainability report this year. So, Crisil will be able to enhance its coverage to more than 1,000 companies going forward. This year, we analysed even unlisted companies because their investors wanted to be apprised.

There are multiple opportunities — to evaluate companies and benchmark them, on the data side such as helping them understand on what basis we are evaluating, helping them look at models from the lending community’s perspective, helping them understand how to evaluate companies on the entire ESG lens. These are all areas where we could step in. So, the opportunity matrix is expanding, and we can play a role as an organisation across the spectrum. That opportunity is going to keep expanding. It is for us to then see what makes sense, where we can leverage that opportunity, what is the right area for us, and work with that capability skillset and help develop that. 

There is no overlap. Our businesses are independent. In some spaces, we work in tandem with S&P. Every global institution is looking at sustainability either for their portfolio or for their own selves. With all the stress and global crises that have played out, financial risk has evolved, as have financial institutions. But if you look at the non-financial risk space — global financial crime, for instance — institutions are looking to have a lot of investments going into that area. It is an area of opportunity for us, while looking at non-financial risks.

In the data and analytics space, the way data is getting consumed today, there is a huge opportunity. One is the tech part and the other is understanding the domain, the processes, and the digital nuances. How do you bring all that together to help organisations transform and ensure that the data is also being leveraged and built? These are the aspects that are going to drive opportunities for Crisil in the global space, and we are assessing how we can build capabilities to address them.

Some of our plans there have been accelerated such as digital transformation, predictive analysis, how we can leverage and help intelligence, and research and data that can help decision-making. As institutions and customers evolve, institutions are going to look for much more data and research to help them do this. There are some themes that are emerging for us, and we will work on and drive those opportunities at our pace.