It's been long!

No matter how much I promise myself that I will blog as often as possible and inform my audience about various things including Axience, general business environment, global financial services, outsourcing and some fun stuff, it always becomes a promise far from being kept. Let's try again!

Axience

We have been doing well, getting enough attention amongst potential clients, partners and potential employees. The fact that securitization industry initially, then global financial system and now entire economy is going throuh a rough patch does make things difficult for us albeit it gives us an experience which will be very useful in better markets. Over last few months we have increased breadth and depth of our service offerings and clients. Our initial clients are satisfied and have put faith in us by giving repeat work and renewing contracts. We have expanded into areas such as investor mapping, client and market intelligence, investment research, pitch books, bespoke reports for government sector. Our clients now come from UK, France, India, Germany, Netherlands and last but not the least India where we are doing some very interesting work for global as well as Indian clients.

Other significant development include appointment of Mr. Nitin Mehta as a Director at Axience. Nitin currently runs CFA Institute in EMEA and has about 20 years of work experience. His profile is available at http://www.axience.com/about_bod.htm.

We are constantly looking for clients who we strive to create significant value for and if you are one of them then feel free to call me at 3 AM in the morning (well if you really want to do that you may want to check out the time zone I am in given the travel I have been doing these days ;).

We are also looking for partners as well as investors. Please feel free to seek more information.
Most importantly we are always looking for top of the class professionals.

Securitization industry

Last 12 months have been unheard and unseen for financial services industry and most people blame securitization industry for that. Securitization is a process of pooling receivables of varied types and doing magic on them so that they become capital markets tradable products ie securities of some form. I personally belive that there is no issue with the financial engineering behind securitization and it will come back soon. I may be reiterating the wishful thinking which I observed during Global ABS 2008 conference in Cannes among various participants but fact remains that there is little chance we can (and we should not) do away with such an important and until recently widely used funding, capital relief and arbitrage tool. Another interesting thing which I noted during conference at Cannes was number of law firms and army they came with. Some people are cerainly laughing their way to bank in this market. Overall conference was amazing, weather was finest possible in spite of rains and shower warnings and I would like to express my gratitude to IMN organizers and one of our precious client for inviting me and my colleague to the conference. Possibly we will have our own booth there next year.

India
Yes stock market is down, money seems to be drying up, there are rumours of banks as well as offshoring firms laying of but the country seems to be on its' own adrenalin and there are no lack of opportunity. I will start posting some intersting news regularly (good and bad) to give readers some ideas of what is happening in India.

Travels

In last six months I have done professional travel to several places and have been more in the air than on ground (well okay its a bit of exaggeration). I have put my feet to some new countries and have made at least one trip to London and Paris every month, got to see the blue lagoon in Iceland, did Middle East, went to various cities in Germany, US as well as to Budapest and Prague. Most of it for business but after all its enriches the experience. With all the travels I do get some good stories to tell and some not so good ones such as missing flights bagages and once even passport in Paris. As a result I now have an Indian passport made in Paris which was given to me in record six hours time. Salut!

Movies

Lots of them - mostly in flight - watched 21 which is an interesting story of MIT Kids beating las vegas casino system and outsourced which is (surprisingly) well done satire on outsourcing. And Singh is King and Jane Tu...

Books

Red the recent book from the author of Kiterunner - a thousand sins - and the book made me realize the while I was growing up in rather safe and secure environment Laila was going through the extreme circumstance a human being can experience. It was shocking to think that all this happened in last 25 years! Amazing book! hits hard!

Till next time.. hopefully sooner this time else I will outsource my blog to a Robot in "Second Life" - what is the exchange rate between Linden dollar and USD? visit http://secondlife.com.

Hemant Jain
CEO, Axience
www.axience.com
+91 98671 60611
+44 7515 641 602
+33 6 14 06 46 93
hemant.jain@axience.com