Indian business Subex, one of the leading providers of risk and analytics software and services to the telecoms sector, has chosen Nisha Dutt (pictured) to be their next Chief Executive Officer. The publicly-listed company informed markets that Dutt will vacate her current role as an independent non-executive director on May 1 so that she may assume the role of CEO on the following day. Dutt was appointed an independent non-executive director of Subex in 2015, shortly before she became CEO of Intellecap, providers of advice to investors in socially sustainable enterprises in the Global South. She later left her CEO role at Intellecap and in 2019 she founded Decodem, a business that uses artificial intelligence to deliver marketing insights. The 47 year old is Indian-born but has spent extensive time studying and working in the USA, obtaining a Master’s degree from Oklahoma State University and an MBA from Ohio State University.
Dutt’s interest in using artificial intelligence to provide business analysis dovetails with Subex’s attempts to diversify away from telecoms revenue assurance and fraud management through their HyperSense analytics brand. Her interest in social entrepreneurship also complements Subex’s objective of creating over 100,000 ‘citizen data scientists’ within two years. Whilst at Intellecap, Dutt launched a division called Innovation Labs with the goal of identifying innovations from around the world that could be adapted for the Indian market.
Subex’s current CEO, Vinod Kumar, has stated he will depart the business on July 14. Kumar spent five years in the top role, and more than a quarter of a century with Subex in total. He was one of the original management team who worked alongside founder Subash Menon to construct a market leader by applying software and data science to important unsolved problems in the operation of telecoms businesses. Kumar’s leaving represents a changing of the guard in RAFM; he was one of the last chief executives to have personal experience of the challenge involved in introducing the concept of leakage to telcos. I wish him well for the future.
