'OneLoad will revolutionize and change the shape of Pakistan's payment industry': CEO, Systems Limited

Representative of the new breed of young Pakistani professionals leading Systems Limited from pivotal positions, Mr. Muhammad Asif Peer serves as the CEO, Member of the Board, and Managing Director of Systems Limited. Asif Peer has worked across the board at Systems Limited from a developer to the C-level management positions in the US and in Pakistan.

He's a graduate in computer sciences from the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Karachi, which put him in good stead during his first job as a developer at Systems Limited in 1996. After a year, Asif also completed his Master's degree in Business Administration from IBA Karachi, with majors in marketing and finance. Thereafter, he assumed a more challenging role at the US office to take on wider responsibilities with special focus on delivery and management. He worked as Chief Operating Officer at Visionet Systems from 2008 until 2012 in the US office prior to taking charge of Systems Limited as CEO. He works closely with his customers, partners, vendors and governmental institutions and leads Systems Limited's multi-million-dollar expansion program in Pakistan.

<B>BR Research: Walk us through the history of Systems Limited.</B>

<B>Asif Peer:</B> Systems Limited is the oldest software house; we have been in the business since 1977. At that time, it was visionary to set up an IT company. Ever since its inception, the company has evolved and taken center stage in information and technology by providing computing strategies and solutions to the government and private organisations. For around 20 years, our prime focus was Pakistan.

Systems Limited became an employee-owned company in the early 90s. It was a bold and a much needed step, which has formed the foundation of the company. Its leaders and also its past and present top performing employees own over 80 percent of its stock. The remaining shares are held by investment banks that financed our global expansion six to seven years ago.

Subsequently in late 90s, we realised that IT was not growing in Pakistan at the same pace as the world. We capitalized on the opportunity to expand into other markets; we started focusing on North American market after 20 years of existence. Diversification was the key at that time, and we wanted to grow our exports. It was just the right move, and we were able to attract good clientele.

This is where our growth story started. We changed our strategy from being a general purpose IT consulting firm to focusing on some key verticals because of tough competition in North America from the Indians and the Chinese. We decided to create our niche and develop our core competencies in verticals that we had experience in over time; we build products and software accordingly and signed top notch Fortune 500 customers as a result. Our consistent growth with that kind of a strategy stood somewhere between 20 to 30 percent year-on-year.

Reinventing every three to five years has been a significant part of our history. In 2007, we again realized that we have to maneuver. That is when we went into Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) division. Unlike other companies that provided just the labour arbitrage, we focused on building the technology and then entering BPO; our focus was not just selling the resources of BPO, but projecting it as a knowledge-based, technology-led BPO. This division supports our growth plan in the North American market.

In 2012-13, we again jumped in to grab the opportunity to diversify. At that time all the eggs were in one basket as 90-95 percent of our revenue was coming only from North America, whether software or BPO. After working in the US for 12 years, I moved back to Pakistan with a vision to diversify, and split the management to focus on Pakistan. At the same time, we also expanded our portfolio to UAE and Dubai markets with relatively greater ease of doing business. We partnered with a couple of established firms, and we grew tremendously from a very small scale. We have about 80-100 people there and a very large team working in Pakistan in just two years. We also opened an office in Qatar a year later. Our revenue percentage will shift from over 90 percent coming from North America, to almost 50/50 by the end of this year.

<B>BRR: What other countries are you operating in?</B>

<B>AP:</B> We are working in Saudi Arabia, and we have also opened an office is Australia. This whole diversification process has helped our growth pattern over the years.

<B>BRR: What kind of business line you have in Pakistan and the Middle East region?</B>

<B>AP:</B> Middle East does not have the BPO sophistication right now; they are struggling to figure it out. Our focus is in ME thus on providing professional IT services; we are not providing industry solutions in Middle East. Rather, we went in with a technical focus where we have partnered primarily with Microsoft and IBM. And this focus has given us the desired results and recurring revenues.

In Pakistan, we have IT and software services as well as BPO. Around 20 percent of our revenue comes from Pakistani, out of which 7-8 percent comes from BPO. Our interest and shift in strategy is now geared to doing big public sector projects in Pakistan in segments where very few players have the credentials to compete. We believe that we have the arm to deliver and financial muscle to take certain risks.

We have various competencies; Our work philosophy is simple - deliver quality and value by generating flexible software solutions within a fun, disciplined, and a receptive work environment that promotes unity and fortify the strength of the company.

<B>BRR: What potential do you see in export markets?</B>

<B>AP:</B> Pakistan is no doubt a growing market, but we also see great potential in export markets. US market is always a solid market as an export economy for profits. Middle East is also picking up.

<B>BRR: Who are your competitors?</B>

<B>AP:</B> We are the only IT organization that does many things. Hence we have different competitors in every technology space or domain. From a System Integration perspective (SI), we are the largest in the country.

<B>BRR: What are your IT domains?</B>

<B>AP:</B> We have six solid arms: ERP, BPO and Middle ware, Business Intelligence, E-commerce, Portals and Collaborations, and Enterprise Mobility. We also have user experience and other shared services like infrastructure cloud offering, database services, and support services round the clock. We do digitization here in Pakistan; we are the largest in terms of OCR (Optical Character Recognition), ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition), and document digitization perspective. We have done a lot of research, and we have spent a lot on our OCR/ICR tools through machine learning and artificial intelligence.

<B>BRR: You've talked about venturing into big public sector projects. Can you elaborate more?</B>

<B>AP:</B> We are doing document digitizing for the government here - we are digitizing land records for Punjab and also building them centralized software. You'll see everything in the new system after a few months. This system that we are building for Punjab Government is going to be the largest in South East Asia region. The mere size of it makes it quite challenging, and we are eying for its success as it will open new opportunities for us.

While document digitization is a key focus, we are also working on other domains in the public sector like ERP, integration, middle ware, e-commerce. We are working on a payment mechanism; we have a huge payment gateway that Telenor uses for Easypaisa.

<B>BRR: No payment gateway has emerged or come into the country over the years due to various reasons like security, financial inclusion etc. What is the future on this front because e-commerce is expanding?</B>

<B>AP:</B> Things are moving forward. I believe it was initially the fear factor. But things have to change as the regulatory environment improves. The smartphone and e-commerce industry is a big opportunity for players to come in.

Here I would like to highlight that for unbanked population, the initiative that we have taken is that we have invested heavily for the last 2.5 years to create a disruption in the existing ecosystem; we have worked on to provide one-door payment mechanism, which was much needed. Our product 'OneLoad' is unique in nature and first of its kind in Pakistan. We have monetized the mobile load, which is used as the currency. It is a smart e-payment solution.

To explain it further, OneLoad is a unique product for the local market that provides aggregated prepaid airtime recharge and a host of other value-added services. It uses a multi-channel approach to facilitate the purchase and disbursement of mobile prepaid vouchers. The users can create an account online, and can avail services from multiple mobile operators and utility companies at the tip of their fingers using SMS or mobile app. We are also working on integrating with retail shops and e-commerce website to create a seamless mechanism.

We are focusing on heavily on its branding and marketing right now. We believe that OneLoad will revolutionize and change the shape of Pakistan's payment industry. It will eventually replace the 'cash-on-delivery' mode of payment. Even without any marketing, we have generated good results.
Thus our target is now to push it forward.