Reprint: R1106A
Bhasin was the head of GE Capital in India when, in the late 1990s, he had a vision for the future of a small division that was providing back-office services such as processing car loans and credit card transactions for the local market. GE Capital was the first foreign-owned financial services company that had been allowed into India. Considered an experiment by the government, it was hypervulnerable to changes in policy and philosophy. Bhasin wanted to find a safe and sustainable means of growth. The eager, ambitious talent pool he could see all around him, both inside the company and across the country, gave him an idea: Why not take advantage of that resource to offer support services to GE Capital all over the world?
The people he turned to for advice were uniformly discouraging. How, they asked, could he build a facility on the scale he would need, hire huge numbers of people and train them to Six Sigma standards on products they knew nothing about, and gain access to telecommunications and infrastructure at a level then unheard of in India? Undaunted, Bhasin pressed on, and today Genpact, which was spun off from GE Capital in 2005, directly employs 43,000 people and serves 400 other companies in 13 countries.
The Idea: As the head of GE Capital in India, Bhasin found its growth hamstrung by government bureaucracy. Then he had a vision—he could offer back-office services across GE Capital. It was the beginning of Genpact—and of an entire industry.
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