Sorry for the late post. We got caught up in work.

Training:

We are wrapping up training for the first batch of trainees. The trainees (Ashok, Varakumar and Venumadhav) are well trained in Mutual Funds and are ready to go out on the field and advise people on mutual funds. They are enthusiastic about it as well.

The training took a few more days than we originally planned. We have a better idea as to what all needs to be done during training, the next time around training should go on more smoothly and we should be able to finish the training in twelve days.

Company Incorporation:

Cressida Financial Services is registered and is a legal entity as of last Thursday. We would like to thank our Auditors Badami & Kamath for hand holding us through this process. There are other formalities, like tax registration, bank account etc that need to get done and we are working on those.

Staring Sales Activity:

It took us two and half months of gestation for us to reach a stage where we are ready to advise investors on Mutual Funds. We are putting together a sales plan for the next four months. I am very confident that our sales would be great and we would be operationally profitable.

Insurance: While we are ready to go market with mutual funds, we are yet to add Insurance to our portfolio and we will doing so very soon. Vinod Shankar, Business Development Manager, HDFC Standard Life is helping us with this.

Weekly Day Off : Tuesday --> Sunday:

I am full of crazy ideas and having Tuesday as our day off was one such. The idea was our customers would be a freer on Sunday and it would be easier to do business with them on a Sunday. While I personally didn't mind it, it was causing of a lot of disruption to my colleagues personal lives. So we are reverting to traditional Sunday-off scheme of things.

We are looking to hire an Operations Manager, we have four well-qualified candidates in the pipeline and we'll be interviewing them soon.

Thats all for now. Until next week, take care.

Organzation Name and Structure Changes:

Inez Finserve --> Cressida Financial Services.

Our happiness regarding name approval was shortlived. We received incorrect information from our Auditor's office. Anyway we are actively thinking of suitable way to brand ourselves given that the name that is approved is Cressida Financial Services. We will go back and talk to 3XUS and see what they have to say.


Nandan's Promotion:

It is been little more than one month since Nandan joined and he has been doing an excellent job at all the tasks that were assigned to him. On the other hand, I sometimes am impatient to work through the nitty-gritty. So it made sense for me to step down from my role of Head - Operations and let Nandan manage the entire operation.

Please congratulate on his super fast promotion. He well and truly deserves it.

I will also be working full time but it will not be in a managerial kind of role. While I will continue to dream big dreams, Nandan and I will take collective ownership of converting those dreams into reality. Nandan will also be assigning one-off tasks to me as I do have to time to spare.

The other day when Professor Vivek was telling us how Infosys has Nandan Nilekani. I almost told her that we have a Nandan too who could grow to that level and more :-)

This is the first official posting for Inez Finserve; This Blog will be updated every Monday henceforth either by RK (Head - Strategy) or by Nandan (yours truly, Head - Operations).


Inez Finserve has started operations beginning October 2005. We are branding overselves as a company whom you can trust to help you with your financial planning.

To be more professional in our outlook and approach we are working with Prof. Vivek from IIMB to hone our business planning.

Initially we are limiting our scale of operations to three cities Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai. Each city will initially be serviced by a Branch Manager assisted by four Financial Advisors (FAs). The hiring process for these positions are in process and should be completed within the next 10 days.

The FAs will undergo a two-week inhouse training in Bangalore which includes AMFI Certification Test training; soft skills; making them aware of and inculcating them in the core values of the company.

Investors' Meet
There has been two investors meet held till date. These have been wholly made up of RKs' ex-colleagues from Trilogy; it has been more of an informal follow-up meetings to RKs' initial round of discussions with them.

Inez Finances
Inez has sufficient funds to keep it operational even with zero revenue generation till March 2006; but we are confident of earning profits which would enable us to increase the manpower size to 45 (15 FAs in each of the three cities).

Hiring Process
Inez is in the process of recruiting 8 new FAs to its ranks, 4 each in Hyderabad and Chennai. Recruitment is a two step process beginning with a written test to gauge the applicants mathematical and language skills followed by a personal interview conducted by myself and/or RK.