Ajay T Kumar
Service Delivery Manager
Bengaluru
Summary
Highly accomplished professional with 15+ years of experience driving successful projects across diverse sectors, including Banking, Finance, Learning Management, and IT. Demonstrates a proven track record of delivering projects on time and within budget by effectively aligning business and technical objectives. Possesses deep expertise in investment banking, particularly in ETD trade operations, NAV calculation, and client relationship management. Adept at building and leading high-performing teams, ensuring quality assurance, and managing complex system migrations and implementations.
Overview
16
16
years of professional experience
5
5
years of post-secondary education
Work History
Service Delivery Manager
HCL Technologies
08.2021 - Current
- Client Overview: Google Client
- Responsible for the entire service delivery lifecycle, from planning and execution to monitoring and improvement.
- Supporting Google LLC on the Learning Management Domain.
- Manage cross-functional teams of 30+ individuals, including developers, testers, and IT support, operating in onshore and offshore models.
- Experienced operations manager with a demonstrated history of working in the IT and Services industry.
- Skilled in service delivery, major incident management, ITIL process implementation incident management and ServiceNow.
- Experienced with emphasis on people management. Excellence in leading and managing the LMS process along with set of other processes with in the organization.
- Directing team to achieve their annual goals.
- Act as the primary point of contact for clients, building and maintaining strong relationships, and ensuring client satisfaction.
- Ensure that services are delivered according to agreed-upon SLAs and that performance metrics are tracked and met.
- Responsible for identifying, escalating, and resolving service-related issues in a timely and effective manner.
- Monitor service performance, analyze data, and prepare reports to stakeholders on service delivery performance.
- Identify areas for improvement in service delivery processes and implement changes to enhance efficiency and quality.
- Manage the resources (people, budget, and tools) required for service delivery, ensuring they are allocated effectively.
- Lead and manage service delivery teams, providing guidance, training, and performance management.
- Communicate effectively with internal and external stakeholders, keeping them informed about service delivery progress and performance.
- Responsible for managing budgets for service delivery, ensuring that resources are allocated effectively and that costs are kept within budget.
- Improve systems by studying current practices, designing modifications.
- Recommend controls by identifying problems, writing improved procedures.
- Define project requirements by identifying project milestones, phases and elements, forming project team, establishing project budget.
- Monitor project progress by tracking activity; resolving problems; publishing progress reports; recommending actions.
- Prepare technical reports by collecting, analysing and summarizing information and trends.
- Validate resource requirements and develop cost estimate models.
- Perform daily, weekly, and monthly reviews and analyses of current processes using operational metrics and reports.
- Manages end-to-end service delivery for the designated client, including quality assurance and audit adherence for all related workstreams.
- Leads and facilitates the daily scrum calls.
- Holds regular monthly and quarterly business reviews with stakeholders to discuss highlights, challenges, solutions, and progress against milestones.
- Proactively analyzes performance gaps, develops alternative solutions, and helps implement modifications for improvement.
- Maintains optimal application performance and usability for all system users by diagnosing and resolving issues, and identifying areas for improvement through root cause analysis and recommendations.
- Design test scenarios and scripts, and conduct regression testing in the production environment before and after each deployment.
- Facilitate communication and collaboration between teams to optimize workflows.
- Conducted regular reviews of service offerings, identifying gaps in the market, and recommending new solutions accordingly.
- Led cross-functional teams to achieve project goals on time and within budget.
Manager - Trades & Reconciliations (Hedge Funds)
State Street HCL Services
06.2017 - 08.2021
- Manage a team of Finance operation professionals (20+ FTEs).
- Perform daily operational activities including trade matching, reconciliations, position management and life cycle events.
- Analyzing the trade/ FX mismatches in reconciliation report and manually calculating the trade/price impact.
- Reconciled ETD and OTC products and ensured that they are properly delivered to clients before the deadline.
- Perform option assignment and expiry processing and reconciliation.
- Ensuring that all the Future and Option trades are processed appropriately in the general ledger and also verifying any material late trades are reflected appropriately in the general ledger.
- Comparing trade price, fees, Commission, with broker and client & Bloomberg communicating with client and broker and reporting if any difference.
- Manages daily communication with various brokers, counterparts and custodians to confirm and verify executed trade information.
- Monitors large wires and ensures timely approving at Second level approval.
- Monitor and run system processes, including the end of market and end of day processes for exchanges, report and extract generation, system feeds, reference and static data, error analysis and remediation action.
- Reconciling the suspicious moves and errors to have error-free data and ensure prevention of reoccurrence.
- Performing monthly funds and providing the coverage with accuracy to finalize the NAV for Clients.
- Monitor the core trade order management system to ensure all transactions are processed through to the accounting platform and settlement instruction module.
- Match client instructions with broker confirmations, liaising with client support teams and brokers where applicable to ensure all transactions are instructed to the market within published deadlines.
- Reconciling the cash & securities (Hedge fund Portfolio) on a daily basis and rectifying the discrepancies for cash and stock.
- Checking the pricing, Positions of securities and contacting support for a price correction.
- Preparing Open items files for outstanding breaks which will be queried to the Client.
- Calculated the late trade materiality for the trades flown late into accounting to identify the NAV impact.
- Review sign-off on client level reconciliation, financial statements and associated reports before sending to FA team.
- Resolve and escalate all material issues affecting the NAV production process/client service delivery in an appropriate timely manner.
- Work closely with all stakeholders and the team to improve the process, monitor and report on resource management at client, individual and location level.
- Coordinate and closely work with Oversight on New client on-boarding, migrations, existing deliverables and SLAs; monitor timely & quality progress of clients, fund launches.
- Identify and facilitate employee training needs to efficiently manage work pipeline; monitor requirements against actuals while proactively engaging stakeholders to facilitate hiring and training requirements.
- Identify and develop local SMEs for all key activities.
- Review and action on Operational MIS Reporting - reporting on Fund Operational Metrics, adherence to risk and best practice guidelines, turnover, productivity/efficiencies.
- Flagging key issues proactively and supporting the management with solutions, KPI/SLA reporting, and any other operational or strategic initiatives.
- Primary point of contact for the Year end process with respect to audit timelines, Financial Statement Preparation, Regulatory filings, etc.
- Drive initiatives to enhance client experience and improve operating efficiency and productivity through process improvement.
- Strategize and execute BCP as per the BIA agreement – Work Load Swaps, DR testing.
- Enhanced customer satisfaction by resolving disputes promptly, maintaining open lines of communication, and ensuring high-quality service delivery.
Assistant Manager – Securities Pricing
Citi Corp Services
10.2013 - 06.2017
- Review and analyze daily securities pricing tolerance and exception reports.
- Price fair value securities as well as securities requiring additional research through use of Bloomberg and Reuters.
- Manage and maintain pricing database control list i.e Stale price, due to no trade.
- Assist Manager in coordinating the research and resolution of valuation issues pertaining to portfolio managers and brokers.
- Analyze new addition to the pricing database, specially complex securities to ensure proper documentation and valuation is within the context of pricing conventions.
- Monitor and evaluate relevant market news by keeping abreast of significant events that may impact the valuations of the security.
- Assist manager as liaison to external auditors.
- Effectively co-ordinate the compilation and presentation of price date to support the valuation confirmation of yearend financial statement for all fund products.
- Support control testing by firms internal auditors.
- Liaison hand in hand with technology departments to resolve technical problems and enhancement projects.
- Toil with testing team to ensure that test cases conform to User Acceptance Criteria (UAT) and NRT (Non Regression Testing) and ensured final sign off to release code into production.
- Analyze and research on pricing discrepancies which may include: open/high/low/close factors, bid/ask, and day to day price fluctuations for equities, mutual funds, and indexes.
- Perform quality control check on the pricing feeds that were extracted from the data vendors as per client requirement.
- Scheduled validation on Intra & COB FX Rates & Interest which is extracted from vendors like Reuters & Bloomberg.
- Huge variation exceptions would be further investigated with other vendors and mails will be sent out for confirmation.
- Execute UAT testing during on boarding of new clients so see the scope of vendors pricing the securities prior to production roll out.
- Supervised day-to-day operations to meet performance, quality and service expectations.
- Mentored junior staff members in their professional development by offering guidance/support in their assigned roles.
Team Leader – Fund Accounting
BNP Paribas
12.2010 - 07.2013
- Performing and Reviewing Start of Day Activities like: New Accounts Creation, MTM Checking, Error Trade confirmations, Units and Cash posting & Liaise with Night op’s team for EOD status.
- Reviewing the corporate actions booked in the system and ensuring that the same is correctly reflected in the books.
- Dividends/Interest Reconciliation with Broker reports.
- Prepare Cash/Position/Market Value Reconciliations and resolving breaks.
- Notify Clients/CSMs of valid breaks Follow up with support teams for any issues related to prices with corporate action securities, Swap or derivative Securities and getting it adjusted.
- Preparing and Reviewing the Benchmark Reports for funds which crossed Tolerance.
- Sending final sign off mail with full information and backups.
- Complete audit reviews and ensure identified issues are documented and tracked to closure.
- Handling all BCP Activities every month and sign off to Risk team.
- Attend all Periodical Audit meetings and discuss on controls.
- Responsible to review/prepare the NAVs of the hedge fund clients on a daily/Monthly basis.
- Set performance expectations for the team, monitoring progress towards goals and providing constructive feedback as needed.
- Developed team members'' skills through targeted coaching sessions, resulting in improved individual performance.
Process Associate
Franklin Templeton
04.2009 - 11.2010
- Creation and maintenance of securities (Equity, Bonds, CMO, ABS, Federal Agency bonds, Mutual Funds etc.) in the company’s database to be traded by the Trade Desks in US.
- Tracing Symbol changes, Listings & Delisting of Equities in the Stock Exchanges.
- Track the Options from the Options Clearing Corporation and Create/Update the same in our internal Database.
- Sourcing prices from approved sources an all securities appearing in the reports.
- Research Bloomberg, Telekurs to secure prices if not available from vendor or trader sources.
- Working on Missing, Incorrect & Historical Prices.
- Research on Corporate Actions taken towards different firms, and identify the effect on securities.
- Modifications shall be done to the Securities portfolio of the clients if any deviations identified.
- Researching the product information on various search engines like Bloomberg, Financial Times Interactive Data, Standard & Poor’s CUSIP web, Telekurs.
- Complete validation on Intra & COB Forex Rates & Interest which is extracted from vendors like Reuters & Bloomberg.
- Securities Pricing
- Managed multiple tasks simultaneously, ensuring timely completion of all assignments.
Education
MBA - Finance
St. John’s College of Engineering
01.2006 - 01.2008
B.B.M - undefined
Osmania College
01.2003 - 01.2006
Skills
Asana
Transition Experience
- LMS tool from Intellum to Docebo (LMS to LXP), 03/01/23
- LMS Operations from UK Google GOC to HCLTech, 01/01/21
- ETD Trade Operations/ Hedge Fund Reconciliation project from Manila & Poland, 01/01/18 - 12/31/19
- Security Valuation/ Fund Onboarding project from Luxemburg, 01/01/14
- Static Data/Security Valuation project from Sydney to Chennai, 01/01/11
Timeline
Service Delivery Manager
HCL Technologies
08.2021 - Current
Manager - Trades & Reconciliations (Hedge Funds)
State Street HCL Services
06.2017 - 08.2021
Assistant Manager – Securities Pricing
Citi Corp Services
10.2013 - 06.2017
Team Leader – Fund Accounting
BNP Paribas
12.2010 - 07.2013
Process Associate
Franklin Templeton
04.2009 - 11.2010
MBA - Finance
St. John’s College of Engineering
01.2006 - 01.2008
B.B.M - undefined
Osmania College
01.2003 - 01.2006
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