How Jayesh Surisetti and team are trying to improve the Banking, financial services and insurance sector with their startup – NIBF

There are various sectors and industries in our country that are operating on an enormous scale, but one of the most significant areas with a considerable rate of employment is the BFSI sector (Banking, Finance Services, and Insurance). With so many public and private banks in the country, people were continually studying and getting coachings for the banking examinations.

Some would lack awareness, whereas some would lack preparation and do not get their dream job of being a banker or working in the BFSI sector. This was the sweet sector that needed development in the quality of Human Resources and Jayesh Surisetti felt that the quality of lower and middle management level of banking was struggling hard to keep up with the current required standards. This worked as a significant loss for many organizations and for aspirants who blindly followed the crowd and had no understanding of what the recruiters wanted from them. Being an experienced banker, Jayesh didn’t let go of this opportunity and decided to take on this opportunity, and this is how NIBF was conceived.

The journey to NIBF

Jayesh Surisetti was born in Andhra Pradesh, but he was raised in Raipur for most of his life and thus he calls Raipur as his hometown. After completing his schooling from Raipur, he pursued BBA from Symbiosis, Pune, where he was a gold medalist. After this, he decided to pursue PGDM from IIM Raipur and kept the record of being a gold medalist and even received a medal from the President of India.

Entering the corporate world with such a remarkable record, he was associated with several consultancy firms, news agencies, publishing houses, and educational institutions in diverse capacities. Some of these firms were Deloitte, NTPC, Pratham International, PT Education, and Central Chronicle. The last project he worked on was with ICICI Bank, where he handled employee relations in Maharashtra and Goa. Apart from this, he has also written papers for various areas like macroeconomics, media studies, legal studies, human resources, and social psychology.

What is NIBF?

NIBF is an L&D organization that focuses on creating interventions that would add value in different activities for various stakeholders in the Human Resource ecosystem of the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance sector. There were few challenges in the BFSI sector that Jayesh wanted to tackle with his startup; these were:

• Capability challenge- upgrading capability of new and existing employees

• Employability challenge- Increasing employability of aspirants willing to make corporate careers and find the right job

• Availability challenge- Finding the right candidate for the job and right job and place

• Affordability challenge- Premium service with value-for-money to maximize outreach to more cities

Problems in the beginning stage

In conversation with TimesNext, Jayesh talks about some of the problems that were expected to them, such as acquiring corporate clients, increasing the visibility of the platform, and tackling other issues since its a bootstrapped organization.

However, two challenges that were surprising for them was the inertia among students to leave their comfort zones and get into the available jobs. The second issue was that the crowd was hesitant to learn using digital media even among tech-savvy youth.

Collaborations by the company and the first milestone

NIBF has worked and collaborated with about 20 corporates in the BFSI sector for several interventions – training, digital learning, etc. Some of these corporations are HDFC Bank, SUD Life Insurance, ICICI Bank, Jana Small Finance Bank, Fino Payments Bank, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, L&T Finance, and few others.

The first milestone for the firm was the company started working on designing the training architecture for Mahindra Rural Housing Finance Ltd. The most significant milestone for them was when differential banking licenses like Small Finance Bank and Payments Bank came out. They designed transformational training interventions for the organizations, and this helped them to change from the existing business model to a functional model.

The current growth of the company and the vision

After training over 300,000 students across various designations and departments of the BFSI sector, they opened up several courses on the retail front for aspirants, which created employment opportunities for 10,000 students. The company has also started low-cost, self-paced, virtual learning for banking aspirants. They achieved breakeven in 2015-2016, and from the last four years, they have been hitting the Rs100 million revenue consistently and hope to reach Rs150 million mark by this year.

With the vision of making NIBF a household name for training and education segment with all their immediate, short-term initiatives working to benefit every single person in the area. By 2025, they wish to reach 10-15 lakh people with centers in 400+ districts across the country.