Ivan Svitek, Chairman of the Board & CEO, Home Credit and Finance Bank, explains why he would be unable to work with the person he's not comfortable with and tells us about the challenges that he's faced with right now.
1. Would you hire a person if it's not comfortable with him around?
I had a recent example when I knew that the person was a brilliant individual but he would create too much conflict, although he may have been be more qualified than the next person in line but the conflict and the misfit would strongly negate the initial competency that he would bring. But maybe in other environments he would be perfect - so you should also consider the environment and also there should be the personal chemistry. At the end of the day you have to enjoy the people you work with. If I feel the slightest personal antipathy, it will not work - I will avoid spending time with these people, and will avoid difficult conversations, etc. You have to enjoy the people you're with. I just analyzed that the work is not fun, you spend too much time at work.
2. What is the other role of the leader?
In Brazil I met the CEO of one of the biggest headhunting companies in the world. He said that at his first day on this job, one of the board members came up to him and said: "Remember, your role is to make sure that when a person comes into your office and after the meeting is over and the person leaves, that person should feel better leaving your office than coming in". We don't talk much about motivation but it's extremely important, the leader should make sure that the people feel good about themselves and that they feel motivated to the work.
3. What is the most important issue for you now?
If you look at what happened to the Internet and technology you'll see that it completely revolutionized financial services. I would say financial services two years ago and today are two completely different sectors. As the financial services have something to do with the service and we don't have to produce anything, we only benefited from the evolution of technology. That made our services more flexible, available and cheaper and even more present to anybody who would want a credit card, loan, mortgage - whatever. There're also risks associated with that and we saw what happened with the crisis, and one of them is the increasing complexity of financial services and the whole economy.
4. What particularly would you do?
It makes me think what kind of services we would have in the future. And what is clear to me is that the traditional times of banks are over. The financial services should be closer to the consumer and they will be much customized. There will not be a customer coming to the bank and asking them what they have, there will be a bank coming to the customer and offering him everything. The other thing that is changing is that you see more and more companies and other businesses going into financial services. For example mobile phone operators keep talking about providing payments. You have mobile phone distributors with a big chain across Russia - they have thousands of salons where they can offer services. You have payment business which is very specific only to Russia but which is also has some features of financial services. There's a discussion about the social card which will become citizens' benefit card and which will work as the identification and it will be the way for citizens to receive services. The world will be more complex. There's a discussion of building the postal bank in Russia. All these trends will revolutionize in the next twenty years and if we want to be a part of that we should start thinking about it now.
