The Holy Union - Tech and Consulting.

When former banker Nishant Shah moved on from his lucrative career as Head of Operating Risk in JPMorgan India, to start his own firm, he was faced with what is often known as the ‘consulting conundrum.’ The conundrum is that while risk management and consulting expertise solves problems and creates gain for clients in the shorter term, it needs to be supported by well-designed technology to sustain those benefits over the long-term.

At the same time, stand-alone technological solutions are inadequate. This is because, to be able to deploy the underlying technology meaningfully, subject matter expertise is critical. Imagine engineers trying to create hearing aids without the expertise of an audiologist or, say, developers attempting to program contract management software without a lawyer.

A meaningful marriage of consulting and technology is difficult but essential. However, it remains rare, maybe because it is so difficult.

Nishant Shah founded Jackstien Practices, a risk and transition management firm with a stated mission of, amongst others, helping organisations and businesses design and adapt to the new world of remote and hybrid work.

In discussion with Nishant, we realised that remote and hybrid work was a field of study that affected every aspect of work as we know it today, much like law, finance, or psychology. There was, however, precious little by way of expertise in this domain. Ideally placed to fill this gap as an industry and operating risk expert and consummate futurist, Nishant had recognised the advent of remote and hybrid work future years ago and founded Jackstien Practices as the marriage of his passions. “Four hours on the road everyday gave me enough time to think it through” he jokes.

However, the consulting conundrum remained. The immediate next step for Shah was to find the right technology partners to design high quality software solutions for his domain in Banking, Financial Service, and Insurance. The BFSI sector expends upwards of Rs 750,000 million annually, a figure that will likely increase to combat the threat of the FinTech sector.

To rise to the challenge of servicing this industry, Jackstien Practices and Acies Consulting joined forces to create a new entity.

Acies Consulting, a relatively young company are already leaders in their own right. Acies is an award-winning company led by industry stalwarts with more than a century of combined expertise in finance and technology.

The new entity, christened Jonosfero International LLP was founded this year, a product of domain expertise and technology as the answer to the consulting conundrum.

Jonosfero International is already far along the path towards releasing its top tier solutions, with plans to grow to a $350 million entity in under five years, surpassing international best practices in intelligent design.

“For technology solutions, basic design briefs are the easy part if you want to create systems that are just one thing to one person” says Nishant Shah who is the CEO of Jonosfero International “For truly usable multi-faceted systems, it takes expertise to combine enterprise controls with intuitive systems that work for everyone, from sales personnel to compliance departments to HR departments to finance departments”

Hybrid work is one of the most complex challenges organizations face. At the same time, it is one of the most rewarding opportunities as well.

“We put a lot of thought into designing a multi-faceted Hybrid work system for our clients, with every function assessed separately against its own unique parameters to design the perfect hybrid work architecture that works for organizations, functions, and individuals. Crucially, there is a need for sustainable technology that helps maintain and build on our design architecture. For example, many applications today claim to help manage hybrid work but are limited to helping reserve ‘hot-desks.’ In that sense, they are simply versions of applications used to book seats in a theatre. These basic systems feel inadequate because they don’t help to design, manage, or set the parameters based on which the organization can protect its financial, operational, people, stakeholder, and regulatory interests on a day-to-day basis. Building such a system has proven a challenge worldwide and at Jonosfero International, we aim to be the first to do it” says Nishant Shah.

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