Hola! Welcome to the second month of 2017! Surprised? we are too, January is gone. Here is a couple of interesting interviews we published in January. Looking back is always a good thing to do.
Life’s Work: An Interview With Arif Khan, CEO and Managing Director, IDLC Finance Limited [Read full interview]
Arif Khan, CEO and Managing Director of IDLC Finance Limited, has an astounding body of work. He started his career in 1991, and over the past 26 years of his career, Mr. Khan had played pivotal role in the lives of a number of private companies, where he worked in different capacities starting from Probationary Officer to CEO and also in public sector as a Commissioner of Securities Exchange Commission where he headed the Demutualization Project of Dhaka Stock Exchange along with many other big projects.
A large part of his career, 15 years to be precise, is spent at IDLC Finance Limited, one of the fast growing and forward thinking Financial institutions in the country, where he designed and led several of its successful products. After leaving IDLC in 2010, Mr. Khan returned to IDLC Finance Limited as a Managing Director and CEO in 2015, a place he calls. “I’m passionate about.”
In an interview with Future Startup, Mr. Khan reflects on his early life and career and how courage and risk shape our life, how he got into accounting and finance, his early career at IDLC and how curiosity, ambition, and hard work drive us, his vision for IDLC now that he is back again, working culture and growth of IDLC and his plans for the fast-growing NBFI of the country, how professional accounts can contribute to the economic development and his plan for ICMAB, the national body for Professional Cost and Management Accountants, of which he is the current President, and why serving others is the most important work of all that can change our life forever.
An Interview With Dr. Ananya Raihan [Part II]
In this second part of our interview, Social entrepreneur, Economist, and co-founder of Dnet, Dr. Ananya Raihan, talks about hiring and importance of finding right people, organizational culture at Dnet, how Dnet cultivates and maintains a culture of experimentation and innovation, challenges he faced during early days of Dnet and challenges he anticipates in the coming years, his take on CEO job and building a lasting institution and his plans for Dnet in the coming years.
You can read the first part of our interview here.
Life’s Work: An Interview With Ishtiaq Ahmed, CEO, Kazi Farms Group (Feed Business)
Ishtiaq Ahmed, CEO, Kazi Farms Group (Feed Business), reflects on his journey, his experience of working in diverse industries spanning from FMCG to telecom to energy to agri-business, lessons from his journey so far, the importance of getting out of comfort zone in order to realize our full potentials and his management philosophy, why hard work is the ultimate antidote to life’s perpetual challenges and the ephemeral nature of life and why helping others to grow is the best form of legacy.
Aftab Mahmud Khurshid, prominent marketer, Group Chief Marketing Officer of Super Star Group [SSG], reflects on his journey as a marketer, his experience of working in diverse industries spanning from banking to FMCG, what does it take to design an effective marketing strategy, re-branding of SSG, why we don’t have that many leading global brands from Bangladesh, and the future of marketing in Bangladesh.
SSL Wireless is one of the interesting technology companies in Bangladesh. The company has helped launch SMS banking, which is now known as mobile banking in Bangladesh, for the first time. It is one of the key players behind popularizing mobile value added services and many other interesting services in mobile and financial service space over the past few years that are used by millions of people in different ways.
The way SSL Wireless operates and works as a company is also very interesting. Before coming up with a product or service, it looks hard at the lives of its users and listens to them and then design services and products that can add material value to the lives of its users. As an organization, it is largely a people driven company, “we are an employee driven company,” says Ashish Chakraborty, COO of the company.
A large part of SSL Wireless’s business was designed during the time of feature phones, but today we live in a different world. Smartphones are dead cheap and feature phones are dead which is a challenge as well as an opportunity for the company. It has launched new products, moved on to find new revenue streams but still this is a difficult transition for the company.
Recently, we sat down with Mr. Ashish Chakraborty, Chief Operating Officer of SSL Wireless, a wonderful person with a profound understanding of technology business, to talk about early days of SSL Wireless, business, growth and team, changes and challenges in its business and future plans of the company.
