Sunil Paul, Co-Founder & COO, Finesse
Sunil Paul, Co-Founder & COO, Finesse
5 years ago

What is your channel strategy for the Middle East region? How do you cover this huge geography?

Finesse has worked to maintain its comprehensive channel strategy to ensure business growth at all stages and market position. We tend to enhance our terms with channels partners at every point. As partners, we guarantee trained consultants through online trainings and certifications. To be the best, it mandatory to be an influencer when it comes to channel strategy. We have a professional team, one dedicated to each region or a technology, who covers the region thoroughly and maintain customer relationships.

With the channel partner market constantly evolving, what are the key elements that a partner should incorporate?

It’s imperative for every organization to have a strong relationship with its partners to run position itself as a business leader amidst the competitors. For Finesse, it’s important to align business with the partner to leverage upon the customer base, technical resources and to promote the solutions with commitment. It is essential to have a win-win situation for both of us. From training for consultants and sales team to incentives on deals, it’s important for both to provide some privilege levels.

What is the biggest challenge that the Middle East channel partners are facing?

MENA region is always adopting new technologies, market liquidity and tech infrastructure. Observing this, every organization, at some point, faces challenges of cultural barriers, corporate governance and talent shortage. With improvising technology, it’d essential for us to get the best professionals on-board to fulfill client’s requirements.

Now-a-days, vendors are demanding more from channel partners. How challenging is it to keep up to their expectations?

The real deal here is to harness a business relationship. Keeping in mind the market scenario in a region, vendors will also need to behave accordingly. Fortunately, Finesse till now have never failed to fulfill its partner demands. Finesse specializes in industry verticals as well as bringing in the best of breed solutions, it is a win-win for everyone here. We have a command over RPA, Blockchain, BI & Analytics, CRM, Treasury Management, CPM and many more technology solutions. Apart from this, when it comes to industry verticals, Finesse leads the market with more than 80% banks as our clients in the region.

How are you adding value to your vendors whose products you represent?

Value addition plays an important role to run the business in a competitive market, indeed. Finesse provides a high level of expertise and professionalism. We ensure that high service level is a maintain pre and post the technology implementation. Companies tend to get at ease after implementation process finishes, whereas, we believe that technology needs a regular boost to keep up the pace with the market. Speed of delivery also matters for every customer. It is imperative to delegate at least one dedicated technical resource responsible for every customer. Some small steps taken in business can add a lot of value to the organization, vendor as well as the solution together.

What product or technology should the channel watch out for this year?

Disruptive technologies can determine the way industries work sometimes. Artificial intelligence, treasury management, Blockchain, AI- based chatbot and RPA are the technologies we will be looking forward to this year. Blockchain comes up as a fundamental part of business processes these days. It is enabling transactional transparency across different business verticals worldwide. Whereas RPA innovations continue to get breakthroughs, and artificial intelligence opens a whole new array with large amount of data to learn from involving machine learning.