Razor-pay recognized as India’s best companies to work for
Razorpay, India’s first converged payments solution company, has been recognized as ‘India’s Top 50 Great Mid-Size Workplaces’ by the Great Place to Work (GPTW) Institute.
Great Place to Work recognition is one of the most prestigious workplace achievements for an organization across the globe and Razorpay has been ranked 25th as India’s Best Companies (Mid-Size) to work for.
The recognition is bestowed after a careful assessment of various parameters including level of trust that the employees feel towards the management, respect and fairness at workplace, the sense of pride they feel for being associated with the Company and the overall workplace camaraderie.
“Being recognized as one of India’s Great Mid-Size companies to work for is truly humbling and encouraging at the same time. It is a strong testimony of the trust and confidence that our employees invest in us. Over the last three years, we have put in efforts towards cultivating a culture of ownership and belonging amongst employees, ensuring they get ample opportunities to grow and lead impactful careers. This ranking is indicative that our efforts are in the right direction, inspiring us to take excellence to new heights,” said head of people operations, Anuradha Bharat.
While Razorpay breeds a transparent work culture, encouraging employees to develop the hunger to learn and do more, the company is also known for its employee friendly work culture and a low attrition rate. Razorpay has achieved many significant milestones early on in their journey, witnessing growth both in terms of market share and mind-space with customers and industry peers alike.
GPTW is globally recognized for its rigorous and objective methodology for identifying and defining great workplaces across business and government organisations. Every year, more than 10,000 organizations from over 58 countries, choose Great Place to Work®, for assessment, bench marking, and recognition. Great Place to Work® Institute’s methodology is globally considered as the gold standard for defining great workplaces across business, academia and government organizations. India’s Great Mid-Size Workplaces – 2018 have been identified from the companies having employee strength between 100 to 500 employees.
India’s MF industry one of the costliest globally: Ex-Sebi chief UK Sinha
The asset management industry in India is one of the costliest and there is a lot of scope to further bring down the costs of investing, said UK Sinha, former chairman, Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi).
While delivering his speech as the chief guest for Business Standard Fund Café 2018, Sinha said due to high costs we are seeing assets moving away from actively-managed funds to exchange-traded funds.
“Very serious focus on cost reduction is required, without which the industry may face some serious bumps,” he said. Sinha said high costs is one of the reasons why pension money was going towards passive funds.
“Even when EPFO started investing in the markets, they preferred to go into index funds and not in active schemes.”
Globally, also trillions of dollars were moving from active funds to passive funds, said Sinha adding that the same trend could play out in India. Sinha cited reports of industry players not adhering to the commission ceiling set by industry body Amfi.
“There is a circular from Amfi asking industry to observe self-discipline. There are reports that are not being seriously implemented,” he said.
He said during his tenure at Sebi and even now there is a serious debate whether the market regulator should set a ceiling for the commission. “If Sebi does it, the rules will be etched in stone. It is better the industry lowers the cost on its own,” he said.
He said some equity schemes were paying commissions were as high as three per cent and during his time more than one per cent commission was the order of the day.
“I hope good sense will prevail in the long-term interest of the public there will be some movement towards a situation where there is focus on reducing costs,” he added.
Sinha praised the growth shown by the domestic mutual fund industry in the past five years, adding that there was potential for the industry assets to grow five times in the next five years.
“SIPs are growing fast, equity assets are growing fast, scheme performances have been good, the industry has many reasons to be proud of,” he said.
He credited the investor awareness programmes undertaken by Sebi and also the industry for the growth in assets.
“The campaigns launched in the last six years have been extremely helpful. Sebi itself has done over 50,000 investor awareness programmes. The AMCs also have conducted a lot of programmes. The TV ads have had a good impact in delivering the message,” he said.
Sinha warned the industry of potential disruption arising out of new entrants to the distribution scene.
“Time has come for the distribution industry in India to acknowledge the important changes taking place around us,” he said.
“Block-chain has been used successfully to distribute mutual funds globally. Players like Google are looking to enter the asset management industry. Many technology companies trying to enter the MF space, in the same manner, they have entered the payment space,” he said.
“Business as usual will not survive,” he said.
“There will be changes. Some of them could be very disruptive. The question is are we preparing ourselves to adapt to these changes,” he said while concluding his speech.
Indra Nooyi’s exit: When a female CEO leaves, the glass ceiling is restored
With the announcement of Indra Nooyi’s departure on Monday as chief executive of PepsiCo, only 24 women will remain as chief executives of the top publicly traded companies that make up the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, accounting for just 4.8 percent of its leaders.
And the number is going down, not up. Two other female chief executives recently stepped down — Denise M. Morrison of Campbell Soup and Irene Rosenfeld of the snack food maker Mondelez International — with only one new female executive being appointed, Kathy Warden of Northrop Grumman. That should raise all sorts of soul searching about what’s happening in corporate America — especially at a time when so much public focus and effort has been put on gender diversity.
One of those many questions is this: Even at companies run by prominent women — where you would think that the glass ceiling had been shattered — why is their replacement hardly ever another woman?
Only three times in history has a woman succeeded another woman as chief executive at a public traded company, according to Catalyst, a nonprofit consulting and research firm on women in business. Anne Mulcahy was succeeded at Xerox in 2009 by Ursula Burns, Andrea Jung of Avon was succeeded by Sheri McCoy in 2011, and Susan Cameron of Reynolds American was succeeded by Debra A. Crew in 2017.
Ms. Nooyi will be succeeded in October by Ramon Laguarta, who has been with PepsiCo for 22 years.
There are many explanations for the dearth of the promotion of women to the C-suite: Boards still have fewer women (about 21 percent for the S.&P. 500), a gender pay gap still very much exists, female executive generally still lack the same opportunities to move up the ranks and there are still simply fewer women in upper management at most companies to be promoted.
Among the explanations is one that is particularly counterintuitive and so sensitive that no female chief executives would speak about it on the record. Several female leaders told me privately they hesitate to promote women into senior positions because they are worried that they will be accused of bias.
In their view, a man will be heralded for doing so while a woman’s motives might be questioned.
It is worth lingering on that for a moment. If some female executives feel reticent to promote women for fear that their actions will be questioned, then the entire approach to creating more gender equality needs to be rethought.
Ilene Lang, interim president & chief executive of Catalyst, scoffed at the idea that female chief executives should be responsible for creating opportunities for women any more than men are.
“Why are women expected to promote more women?” she asked. “Why are the women being over scrutinized more than men? That’s the issue. It’s unfair to conclude that women should be doing more than men do.”
One other significant explanation for the lack of women succeeding other women as chief executive is this: Out of the 71 instances in which women have been named chief executive, only 15 were external candidates, according to Catalyst.
In other words, culturally, it is much less likely that a woman will be hired from the outside, which means having a diverse development pipeline becomes even more important.
Ms. Nooyi said in an interview that the pool of talented women with the right skill set was in short supply when the company considered succession planning at Pepsico.
“I would have loved for the board to have had a woman to pick from. But at the end of the day, the board selects the C.E.O., and we just didn’t have any women who were ready for the job,” she said. “What happens in today’s world is that everybody is trying to get high-profile women. So what happens is that we develop these women and other people poach them.”
“Smaller companies ask them to be the C.E.O. of a smaller company, sometimes before they are ready for the C.E.O. job,” Ms. Nooyi said, adding that she actually had a female executive in mind as her successor, but that woman left several years ago for a job elsewhere.
She didn’t mention her name, but Ms. Nooyi seemed to be referring to to Ms. Crew, former president and general manager of PepsiCo North America Nutrition, who left the company in 2014 to become president of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.
She later became the company’s chief executive before leaving in 2017, when it was acquired by British American Tobacco.
“If she had stuck around and performed well, she was a shoo-in.” Ms. Nooyi said. “She would have been on the slate of candidates.”
“Promoting women is not the issue,” said Ms. Nooyi, who actively added women to the company’s upper ranks — the company’s senior management includes eight woman out of 27 total.
Instead, she said, it’s about “creating an environment, especially if you are running a global company, where women who cannot run overseas businesses can still move up.”
“How do we give them the international experiences? We have to develop those women differently.”
She explained: “The old model assumed the guy would move and that the wife would move with him. Now, you have to have a discussion where both people sit down and ask questions about what happens to the husband if the wife is given this job? What happens to the schooling of the children? It is a much broader discussion.”
In the end, the challenge for gender equality continues, but the issues — and the debate over how to get there — gets more complicated, not less. Ms. Lang said the greatest complication was still what she perceived as a double standard.
“It’s the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire problem: She had to do everything but backwards and in high heels.”
Source: Business Standard.
