Varun Krishnan

Passionate technologist Varun Krishnan has been a member of the Vodafone team for over a decade, working in different departments and providing his expert insight to different teams across the company.

Now, Krishnan is the Managing Director of FinTech, his first role in the FinTech space, about which he is “really excited”.

During his time at Vodafone, Krishnan has had to overcome a number of challenges. “One of the biggest lessons is that, if we really put customers at the heart of our thinking and think about what their pain points are, what challenges they have and how we, as a technology organisation, can help address those pain points, we can really build remarkable successful businesses – such as our global IoT platform, for example. It's about keeping the customer at the heart of our thinking, that is the really key aspect.”

But, with these challenges came great opportunities, as Krishnan notes: “I've been lucky enough to be part of so many different projects over the years. When I first joined Vodafone, I was part of the team that launched Vodafone Red, which basically made voice and text messages unlimited. And at that time, it was unheard of, but now it's become the norm.” 

“I was then part of the team that launched unlimited data as well, which then really led to an industry transformation in terms of democratising access to data for our customers across Europe. More recently, I've been involved in driving adjacent revenues and adjacent category growth, which is a super exciting part of the business to be part of,” he continues.

Now, in a leadership role, Krishnan finds it important to reflect on what he has learnt in his career and share those learnings with his team.

“I've learned a lot from my leaders and mentors, and I always treat every one of my experiences as a learning curve,” he says.

“I think one of the key things that I really appreciated was when I was empowered by my leaders to go out and do something, and I was given full accountability,” he adds. “That's the style I try and embody as well; I empower my teams, I create the support infrastructure around them to help them be successful. Then I coach and I mentor as they need it, and really give them that end-to-end accountability for them to go ahead and be successful.”

Having been in technology and telecommunications for most of his career, Krishnan is fully dedicated to this next step and is really getting his teeth stuck into understanding the FinTech space via networking, collaborating, and technology.

“I'm really excited to be part of this journey. I'm enjoying meeting loads of people from the industry, learning more about the industry, and also thinking about collaboration opportunities and the overlaps between tech and finance that can really build compelling propositions for our customers,” he says.

Concluding, Krishnan sheds light on his passion for the industry and his desire to help technology push forward new developments: “There are a lot of really cool transformations that are happening in the industry – Metaverse is one big one; blockchain technology is another big one. I think there's a lot of disruption to come in the industry in the next few years. And I'm really enjoying being part of groups that brainstorm and start to think about what this new world means for our customers, what this means for our businesses, and what new business models might emerge. That's really fascinating to me.”

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