Event in Delhi - Fintech Roundtable

 Zell organised a Round Table on Fintech Education and ESG, in a Delhi Aerocity hotel on Sept. 25th, 2024, and I was one of the invitees. Deloitte was a partner, and Zell is doing a program along with Deloitte for colleges now, where they will teach a few courses as part of a certification, soon.

Anyway, Suresh Prabhu, ex-CA and ex-minister, addressed the gathering too. He quipped that we make Finance subjects tough so that the Deloittes of the world, or KPMGs of the world, can flourish! Also another highlight was Salman from Zerodha who talked about not scaling up their manpower, and putting customers first- a rarity now, in spite of the many years of talking about customers' importance to businesses.

All in all, an interesting event. We discussed how industry intervention in classrooms may or may not help in the long run. A highlight for me was meeting two people. One, the ex-director of KIAMS Harihar, Dr. Biswal, and Dr. Taruna Gautam, VC of IILM University, Greater NOIDA, who was next to me at the table. She was kind enough to tell me that she had used and recommended my Marketing Research book when she taught Research Methods. That made my day!

Deloitted

Just went and attended on behalf of IIM Indore, an event called the Deans' Summit organised very well by Deloitte. It was a multi-media sensory experience (can't help it, I teach/taught Services Marketing, so bear with me).

A dancing (OK, waving) robot on screen with a voice (over) would introduce each session's speaker, and see her/him off, and in one session, we actually met a robot who walked on to the stage and even spoke contextually.

The sessions addressed issues like Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Cyber-everything including cyber-security, and many more current buzzwords like Big Data, Predictive Analytics and other kinds of it. Interspersed with examples from their consulting practice, it was a good mix of jargon and real application. One of the great attractions was speakers from social spheres-and sports. The founder of Teach for India, for example, was a passionate communicator, who spoke about transforming lives through education, and opportunity. Every kid deserves one! True that.

And of course, there was a fun evening too, with activities like cooking and karaoke-music and food go together, right?

Well done, from conception to execution. You are not a run-of-the-mill consultant, that's for sure!