Pro Vice-Chancellor (Administration & Finance),Ashoka University

B.Com. (Hons) St. Xavier's College

Chartered Accountant and Cost Accountant

Rajesh brings with him over 28+ years of broad-based leadership experience across three leading organizations - Unilever, American Express and EXL. He has helped companies improve processes to achieve business goals of growth, profitability, client satisfaction, operational efficiency and risk management in a controlled and sustainable way. He gained exposure to Food Business at Unilever as Regional Commercial Manager and before moving on to American Express where he played vital roles across functions. Rajesh worked for 15 years (1995-2010) at American Express in India, Singapore and USA. He joined Amex when they were setting up one of India’s first finance shared service center. At Amex he held several roles across Finance, Technologies, Procurement, Operations, Internal Controls and Controllership.

As Pro Vice Chancellor at Ashoka University, Rajesh leads all the non-academic functions and works in close collaboration with the Vice Chancellor’s office to achieve Ashoka’s vision.

Prior to this, most of his roles were focused on creating world class global shared service utilities focused on transforming business outcomes and optimizing costs. His last role in Amex as VP & GM, Global Travel Service Center, was to set-up and monetize a 750 employee center in less than 2 years. He led the spin-off of a 750+ FTE captive shared service center of Amex to EXL (third party outsourcing company). Achieved 100% staff retention, 10% quality improvement and 15% cost reduction in first year. Long term business has grown more than 100% and expanded across more functions and locations.

Rajesh has served as SVP & Business Head with EXL Service (a leading Operations Management and Decision Analytics company). He headed a business and global operations across India, USA, UK, Philippines, Czech and Romania with 3500+ employees globally focused on Travel, Transportation and Logistics vertical.

He has helped his clients achieve world class service standards and significant costs reductions through Process Excellence (Six Sigma, Lean, Benchmarking), Automation (Cloud, Robotics, BPM, OCR), Operating Model Optimization (near shore/ offshore, outsource/insource) and use of Advanced Analytics. This helped him achieve industry leading revenue growth of 23% CAGR. Over last 20+ years have optimized several processes within F&A and Procurement function Payables, Receivables, Collection, Accounting, Book Close, Reconciliations, Customer Servicing, Inside Sales, Billing, Revenue Management, Month close, Reporting, Purchase Procedures, Procurement Contract Review, Spend Analytics. Most projects had multiple levers of Six Sigma, Lean, Automation, Analytics, Simplification & Standardization, Metrication, etc. Typical savings have been 15-30% in year one, and 5-15% year on year thereafter

Rajesh is a commerce graduate from St Xavier’s College, Kolkata, and a rank holder Chartered Accountant and Cost Accountant.