Alumni Profile: Raman Muralidharan of HSBC

Today: Managing Director — Marketing & Direct Lending HSBC. HSBC is one of the five largest banks in the world. Raman's business unit is branded as HFC and Beneficial in the consumer market with about 1400 branches across the United States. The company has experienced rapid growth: Net income this year will be in excess of $1 billion.

Raman Muralidharan

Since joining the company in 2004, Raman has been involved in all aspects of HFC's and Beneficial's marketing, including brand management, customer acquisition, customer relationship management, and up-sell, cross-sell, customer loyalty and retention programs. Raman also manages customer acquisition via the Internet, oversees new product development, and is responsible for competitive intelligence and customer research. He chairs a group which sets product pricing in conjunction with finance and sales.

Recently, Raman was asked to assume management of HSBC's direct channel, which is a call-center based origination channel for financial services and products. His challenges going forward:

1. Keeping this large and immensely profitable business on track.



2. Finding new ways to expand by growing HSBC's branch network and building out the company's secondary channels — direct sales and the Internet.

At Booz Allen & Before: Raman joined Booz Allen's Cleveland office in 1993 and remained at the office during his eight years with the firm. Raman started as an associate in the firm's Engineering and Manufacturing Group and later became a partner in the Consumer and Health Practice. His focus: marketing, strategy, and technology innovation.

During his early years with the firm, Raman worked mainly with product-based companies in consumer durables, the building industry, and the automotive sector. In about 1997, he began working on biotechnology oriented assignments for the agricultural industry. Over time, his work also included the application of biotech-related innovation in pharmaceuticals.

Raman has a Masters in Engineering from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

After leaving Booz Allen in 2001, Raman went to work for Capital One, where he spent six months in corporate development and nine months in the credit card business. After taking some time off when his second child was born, Raman began exploring a broad set of options and chose to join HSBC as VP of Marketing.

Did your experience at Booz Allen give you a strong foundation for your current position? Yes. I really enjoyed my time at Booz Allen and liked consulting as a profession; sometime later in my life I may even consider going back to it. I liked the emphasis on client service, really creating value for clients, and the teamwork and close relationships you can build with your colleagues. I think Booz Allen helped me immensely in two ways.

First, I feel very capable due to all the experience and training I received on the job from people who were very good at doing this type of work. I learned a great deal from them, including how to break down a business problem, understand the existing situation a company faces, know what lever you should be pushing in order to improve the business, and how to order your priorities so you can have maximum business impact. All the skills you learn as a consultant around structured problem solving, setting an agenda, and driving against that agenda have been immensely useful to me.

The second thing which consulting teaches you very well is how to build a coalition around a set of ideas and get an organization excited about those ideas — and then match organizational resources against them. This has also been tremendously helpful in my current job.

What skills did you acquire at Booz Allen? I'll start with what I think are the fundamental building blocks: how to analyze a business situation, how to find strategic leverage, isolating those levers, and then being able to drive an implementation plan against those. To me this is the foundation for adding value as a consultant. I think that the skill set you build around breaking down business problems, understanding a business and its economic levers, researching competition in the industry, and really learning about customer needs and how to develop a set of products and services to fulfill those needs — all this could almost be called "Applied Business Strategy 101."

The second skill set revolves around creating change: Once you have the levers to pull, how do you make sure that others in the organization agree with you that those are the right levers? How do you bring them on board and enlist them in building the solution — and create an agenda that is not only your own, but a shared agenda that many people will want to push forward on together? That is what you learn as a senior consultant and as a partner — not just how to find the answer, but how to make change happen.

In terms of how you create an agenda and drive change against it, I learned a lot from my assignments — and, from my senior mentors, as well as others who helped me grow professionally at Booz Allen.

Would you recommend working at Booz Allen? Absolutely! First and foremost, I'd recommend it because you get to do great work. You also get to work with very interesting people. For me, how much I achieve in my job is in many ways driven by how exciting I find it and how energized I am about pouring all my time and energy into it — and in my eight years at Booz Allen, I never found a moment when I wasn't completely driven by what I was doing. If doing really interesting work and creating business impact and having fun working with a set of people you like and building good friendships is something that energizes you, I'd recommend Booz Allen in a heartbeat.

The other reason I would recommend Booz Allen is more what I'd call the practical, grounded reasons — building the skill sets I've described. These skill sets will stand you in good stead, whatever you choose to do.

Any favorite Booz Allen moments or experiences you'd like to share? I have lots of great memories. There was one assignment, in particular, where we were asked to conduct a global search for an innovative medical project. We had to pull together a team quickly and were working under very tight time pressure. I'll never forget having dinner one night with my team members, looking around the table where we were assembled — and realizing that the 10 or so people there had about 8 different nationalities among them. I remember being amazed at how diverse and talented a group of people we had brought together in the service of our client.

Any advice for people just starting with the firm? I would say focus on building your basic skill set as a consultant, but also take time to learn how to create energy and organizational drive around an agenda. Knowing the answer is important, but making something happen and having a real impact is also key to being successful. I would also say that it's very helpful to find mentors whom you can learn from — seek them out and take in everything they have to teach you.

profile posted September 16, 2005