Craft Silicon- a technology service provider for financial institutions serving over 300 organizations spanned across more than 30 countries. Along with the growth, the company has maintained an employee friendly work culture that led to being certified as ‘Great Place to Work’.
Siva Kumar, CEO of Craft Silicon Asia, with his astute business acumen and empathetic leadership has supported the team to be instrumental behind the organization’s successful growth and positioning across the Financial Inclusion domain.
” At Craft Silicon, we believe the vision, mission and core values lie within every employee, and that’s how we are a great place to work. “
He brings with him a wealth of experience in Information Technology, Banking, and Microfinance. Having been associated with Craft Silicon, Kenya since 2000, he has held several leadership positions along his tenure leading to his appointment as the current CEO.
In an exclusive interaction with CEO Insights, Siva has shed some light on the employee engagement at Craft Silicon that makes it a great place to work while offering abundant growth opportunities.
Here are the excerpts:
How would you define Craft Silicon as an organization and its position in the market?
Craft Silicon is a leading Core Financial System solution provider in the global market. It possesses a rich domain knowledge and a client-centric approach, and it is why the company holds over 40 percent market share in the small Finance Bank segment. Also, the company has a track record of having supported over two billion transactions, $7.4 billion Portfolio outstanding and around 77 million- end customers in 2021. Our mobility applications are robust & scalable to support loan origination, collection, disbursement, delinquency management, analytics and end borrower engagement while covering entire lending value chain.
Tell us about the exposure that your company offers to its employees. Also, what’s the unique work culture followed there?
I believe, work culture is the basic foundation of every organization to attract better talent and more importantly to retain that talent. Hence, we, at Craft Silicon build a workplace where the team understands their role in enabling the technology to accelerate
financial inclusion and inspire each other to work better.
Being a technology service provider, we support lending institutions to enable financial inclusion that acts as a key driver of sustained economic growth by ensuring adequate credit access to unbanked/ underbanked sections and drawing low-income groups
into the formal framework of the banking. Also, we never hold back on making our workplace fun with learning which is the perfect antidote to monotony. We ensure that every employee of our organization feels respected, secured, empowered with right product knowledge, approachable to leadership and be innovative.
Reflect on the unique aspects of your HR policy. What are the growth opportunities and recognition the employees can expect from the organization?
We at Craft Silicon have the most simplified HR Polices that are artistically crafted and in line with the needs of the employees, per se the current environmental concern. Also, the policies here are not enforced on the employees, instead they’re educated on why an organization is bound by such norms. We do so by explaining purpose during the Induction and having a Policy Training and assessment annually to
emphasize the need of such HR Policies.
We also differ in the growth opportunities for employees at Craft Silicon as we don’t have a soak in period for next promotion cycle for our employees here, instead once the talents are identified we immediately expose them to the growth opportunities and encourage them to the right career progression.
What does Craft Silicon expect from new candidates in terms of attitude, work ethics, and talent, among others?
At Craft Silicon, we prefer our new candidates to enjoy the work, understand the impact they are creating within the organization and understanding the customers’ business growth while maintaining professionalism, long term potential growth, teamwork, collaboration at
workplace, being enthusiastic, passionate, and implying critical thinking approach.
What are the ways of recognizing top talents & great performances within the organization?
We help our employees to assess their strong areas and create the platform to perform and excel in their core competencies. We also provide multiple opportunities to explore their interests in across departments for overall exposure conducting regular workshops (to improve leadership skills, empathy, and team collaboration), and once the talents are recognized we expand their learning & development
opportunities, Acknowledge, Recognize and Celebrate their achievements continuously.