Witad Awards 2022: Vendor professional of the year (data and operations)—Subi Sethi, Clearwater Analytics

Subi Sethi grew up in a small town near New Delhi and always aspired to transform her life. That ambition fired her passion for tech transformation. Relentless striving for improvement helped her make her mark as chief client officer of Clearwater Analytics, a global investment accounting software platform that is used to manage more than $5.6 trillion of assets daily.

“My ambition is not to deliver what I’m being asked. That’s part of it, but what I really want is to anticipate the needs of my customers tomorrow, and the day after,” Sethi says.

She manages the entire lifecycle of 1,500 accounts, and about 60% of Clearwater’s staff (over 850 employees) globally. Since joining Clearwater in early 2020, she has guided the company to 25% year-on-year growth, onboarded over 150 new client logos to the platform annually (up from around 30 per year), and raised on-time client reporting to 95%. Clearwater’s Net Promoter score, a measure of customer satisfaction, is now 69 (the average for software-as-a-service platforms is 31). Since Sethi came on board, clients are retained at a rate of 98.2%

Sethi has championed major initiatives at Clearwater. Recently, she led efforts to customize platforms for three major global insurers. One of these signed up with Clearwater in 2020 to onboard over $100 billion of assets to the vendor’s platform, getting over 75 legal entities and a portfolio of complex assets on the system. The project was so successful, the insurer added another $40 billion in assets.

She delivered the project in just 11 months—but it wasn’t easy. “Imagine 75 different companies. And we needed to consolidate all their books and show one at group level,” she says. “You have 75 different companies, 75 different CFOs, 75 different project managers, and you must make sure they all work for a common cause at a common pace. Because you want to onboard this client on your system, you must make sure they all agree with policies.”

Complicating matters was that this took place in the midst of Covid-19 lockdowns, so all meetings had to be virtual.

Sethi began by putting in place a dedicated team for onboarding the insurer client. She held regular forums where challenges could be shared openly, which smoothed the process, she says. “I invest in relationships. … I’m super proud that my clients do not hesitate to pick up the phone and talk to me, and my employee base is the same,” Sethi says.