Gautam Thakkar, VP and Head - F&A, S&F and HRO, Infosys BPO, is a veteran at Infosys. He joined the company more than ten years ago and was chosen along with a few others to give Infosys's new business direction in the outsourcing market. That's how this graduate of Industrial Engineering from Purdue University came to handle jobs that are a far cry from his actual qualifications.

As he and team mates set up the company, he was given the responsibility to handle the fast-growing finance and accounting outsourcing business because he came with an experience of helping organizations to improve their profits and transform their businesses. Under his directions, the FAO business unit of Infosys BPO won recognitions from industry bodies. It has constantly been listed as one of the top FAO services providers globally. Talking about his business unit's success, Thakkar had said earlier, "The ranking validates our ability to build domain expertise and focus on integrated IT & BPO solutions. Our ability to deliver on high-end services through a global delivery model continues to reinforce our leadership in the FAO markets."

Last year the company was also recognized by Gartner and ranked in the magic quadrant of the best global FAO players. To that Thakkar had said, "We believe that our position in the Leaders Quadrant is testimony to our ability in the seamless delivery of end-to-end F&A services from multiple global locations. In a considerably short span of five years, we have been able to scale great heights and significantly transform the finance processes of our clients. We have been able to leverage our extensive technology capabilities, clearly shaping the vision for the next generation of F&A outsourcing. We feel this recognition validates our strategy and the significant investments that we have made in our F&A practice to improve our pipeline and add measurable business value to our clients."

Because of his drive and business initiative, Thakkar is also responsible for growing the nascent human resource outsourcing and sales and fulfillment businesses for the company. Today, his business divisions contribute over 40 percent of the total revenue for Infosys BPO. He has about 7,000 people working under him to drive this growth.

Since Thakkar is one of the founding employees at Infosys BPO, he is also part of the Infosys BPO Executive Council. This means he is responsible for driving new vision and targets for the company, and creating and delivering on new business models. As before joining Infosys Thakkar was part of Accenture's strategic services practice, he has expertise in consulting clients on business transformation, organizational and profit improvement strategies. Today at Infosys BPO as well he is focused on helping clients with business transformation, process harmonization and implementation of better finance practices that dramatically improve service levels.

According to him, the success of the FAO business comes from the fact that he does not work with the clients as a service provider but more as an extension of the client's operations and helps build business value for the client. He explains that he does not work on cost arbitrage but on assisting clients convert the culled data and information into something tangible, and profitable.

He is quite an old hand in driving new businesses and growing them, and has also been given the responsibility to develop the International Centre Strategy for Infosys BPO. This includes developing newer models for global delivery from international centers, driving international-center-specific initiatives and evaluation of potential new locations.