tete-A-Tete : master strokes

A few months ago, Master- Card, which held a 12.5% stake in ElectraCard Services Pvt Ltd (ECS), a payment services provider, decided to take over the latter for an undisclosed sum. Following the successful acquisition, the company appointed industry veteran, Ram Chari as its Chief Executive Officer, to lead this newly-acquired ElectraCard Services Company.

With 20-plus years of financial services and processing experience, having worked in different roles as Senior Business Leader, Alliances and Processing, for MasterCard in APMEA, Chari was roped in to apply his diverse regional expertise to oversee the global operations and growth of the business.

In a chat with Mahalakshmi Hariharan, Ram Chari, CEO at Mastercard Services spoke about the acquisition, his career path, vision for the company and also shared his personal world.

Chari said that the acquisition process will be completed by January 2015. “We will have a new world classoffice in Pune post the merger. The economics, employee acquisition and other essentials will be done by then. After the acquisition, we will have a much larger team of more than 500 employees,” he noted.

At the same time, MasterCard is in no mood for any employee retrenchment. “There will be no layoffs. In fact, we will be investing in people,” Chari added.

Describing the word “challenge” in terms of his everyday life and the fact that this assignment would be quite challenging Chari remarked, “Any integration post-merger is certainly a challenge, because of so many people involved and changing cultures. In fact, if you look at it there are challenges all the time. If I am working with someone and the buck stops at me, I should ensure that the solutionalso lies with me. Any integration is certainly a challenge.”

By Mahalakshmi Hariharan