Warren Barkley, CTO, Clearwater Analytics, India

© Provided by The Financial Express
Warren Barkley, CTO, Clearwater Analytics

Clearwater is a fast-growing SaaS company providing investment data aggregation, reconciliation, accounting, and reporting cloud service solution. The company opened its Delhi-NCR development and operations centre in 2019. In just one year of business operations, it has hired aggressively to enhance R&D, product development, and operations capability and capacity. According to Warren Barkley, CTO, Clearwater Analytics, India has a large talent pool with relevant financial domain knowledge and technical skills for building and operating the company’s SaaS platform. “Our teams in Noida consist of experienced and highly motivated individuals. These teams are integral to our core platform development and operations,” he tells Sudhir Chowdhary. Excerpts:

What has been the impact of Covid-19 on the industry?

Covid-19 has created an unprecedented scenario. OECD predicts global economic growth will decline by 6- 7.6% and, the IMF believes worldwide real GDP will shrink 4.9% in 2020. The financial impact is in the trillions. That said, it has driven companies to adopt remote work and created opportunities for companies providing cloud services. India, with its innovative talent pool and strong technology industry, is well-placed to come out of this crisis stronger.

Clearwater moved early in this pandemic. Even before governments decided to implement lockdowns, all our employees globally began working from home. The safety and security of our employees is our top priority, and we continue to evaluate the situation with that top of mind. Because of our cloud-centric products, elastic processes, and talent of our teams, we had zero disruption to client delivery.

Tell us something about Clearwater Analytics.

Clearwater provides investment accounting and reporting software daily to institutional investors, corporations, and insurance companies globally. Our solution provides clients with a book of record accounting, daily investment policy compliance monitoring, performance tracking, and risk analytics.

Additionally, we have integrated tools that include enhanced statements, income forecasting, reconciliation insight, client billing, and trade confirmations.

Our product suite starts with the daily aggregation of over 2,000 sources of data from banks, investment managers, brokers, order management systems, and third-party sources. This data is automatically validated and reconciled to create clean and accurate portfolio financial data for our customers.

How has the business been in India in the last year? What is the target for FY20- 21?

Our products provide a solution for many companies needing an off-premise solution for their financial accounting and reporting because of the pandemic. For this reason, our global business continues to be strong in all regions. Double-digit growth is our target for both 2020 and 2021, and India is key in making it happen.

What are the growth prospects for the brand in India?

Our primary markets are the US and Europe; however, an increasing number of Asia-Pacific entities use Clearwater. We recently opened a Singapore office and hired a person to lead expansion of our presence in the Asia region. Our flexible, cloud-based system’s ability to handle multiple accounting bases and currencies makes it ideal for companies seeking to efficiently expand operations in new markets. Also, India’s location helps us process the US and European customers overnight and Asian customers real-time during the day.

How is Clearwater looking at expansion for India market?

We are focused on building a world-class product development and operations team and to deliver product solutions from India. Operations in India helps us achieve follow-the-sun servicing for our global clients. With aggressive hiring in India, we plan to double our headcount this year. On the development side, we are excited to expand our hiring in advanced fields like machine and deep learning. We are one of the few who continue to hire during the pandemic with remote hiring, remote joining, remote training, and remote working.