By Dhrumil DhakanBorn in Agra and brought up in Lucknow by his maternal grandparents, in his initial years, Mayank Bhargava moved a lot across cities as a child, due to his parent’s demanding careers. He later moved to Shahjahanpur, where his mother was working with the U.P. Council of Sugarcane Research and was also pursuing her Ph.D. alongside.
Taking a trip down the memory lane, he still remembers his time in the small town, calling it a “closely-knit community”, and a big kitchen garden from which he helped tend and picked fresh veggies from! Even as a child, Bhargava, who is now the CIO at Pramerica Life Insurance, was a brilliant student, during his time at Shahjahanpur.
It was later when he moved to Agra, to his father’s place that he faced challenges in his academic life as he got carried away by overconfidence in his abilities. Consoled by his mother, Bhargava quickly learned his lesson to not take things for granted as everyone is working just as hard, which is something that he still sticks to this day.
Although not being great in sports, Bhargava excelled in extracurricular activities like debating, dramatics, and quizzing, making it to the school team. He believes his participation in these activities gave him good exposure, “Getting to see that there are much better & talented people than what one would consider himself was an eye-opener in itself”, he reminisces.
After grabbing the first spot in his 10th & 12th-grade examinations, he dedicated himself to preparations for getting into the field of engineering, under his parents’ guidance. In 1998, he successfully cleared the entrance exams and got an admission offer from the prestigious IIT-Delhi, where he studied for the next four years. “Living there all on my own was a fabulous learning experience,” he remarks on his time at the institute, “…and that really, I believe, was the foundation of becoming what I am right now”.
What he remembers the most about his time at the engineering college was his first year – which turned out to be an utter disaster marred by bad grades, a consequence of the newfound freedom of college life. Learning yet another lesson, Bhargava managed to turn this around in the second year itself, where he managed to grab a position in the top 5 in his department.
Graduating in 2002, Bhargava was all set for his new journey at IIM-Calcutta for pursuing MBA. In his second year of MBA, Bhargava participated in a student exchange program that enabled him to go to SKEMA Business School in Sophia Antipolis, France. This was an enriching experience for him- learning, traveling around, bonding with batchmates. “That was more than what I wished for!”, he joyfully recollects.
After finishing his MBA in 2004, Bhargava got a job at AIG Inc., which was running its first management associate program in India. Even though his job description revolved around insurance, he was nescient about the concept, stating that, “I had no clue about insurance, except the spelling and that my parents used to pay some kind of premium. That’s all I knew about insurance.”
Speaking about his experience at the first job, Bhargava says that, “From a foundation standpoint, the kind of exposure that all the management associates got was phenomenal. For me personally, it was the best I could have asked for.” Still being in the insurance realm, Bhargava credits his long-standing presence to the one-year program at AIG.
Not particularly interested in technology as an MBA student, where he had the chance to study Systems but leaned more towards finance and management, Bhargava’s attitude towards the technology sector changed during his time at AIG. During these years, he conversed with his friends from the IT sector in the insurance domain who advised him to join IT as his expertise in the insurance industry will be quite valued.
Two years into his career, Bhargava went to Chennai where he was surprised to find himself in a “sea of people”, as he states since he had to work alongside around 30,000 employees. He decided to give his endeavor in the technology sector a shot and developed a flair for it by the end of his stint at Cognizant Technology Solutions.
“By understanding the technology of an organization…you actually would understand the working of the organization,” Bhargava states on what enabled the change from not being interested in technology to developing a taste for it.
His biggest satisfaction while working at this organization was transforming their first insurance account in the country into a profitable one; from struggling to a rapidly growing one. His previous experience of working in an insurance company gave him an edge as he could understand the client and their needs better.
In 2008, Bhargava joined his current organization, which was DLF Pramerica Life Insurance Company at the time, and was still starting out as a startup. As the organization grew at a fast pace, he had the responsibility to prepare the IT applications of the enterprise and make them ready for any challenges. Speaking on his experiences working in uncharted territory, he reveals, “Although, I had not been a techie or a ‘tech geek’ who could code, but I could understand the business and technology and I could make both of them work…I could take the technology part and apply it to a business process or project”.
Bhargava’s biggest challenge in his career came when the management of the organization changed from DLF to DHFL and he led the evaluation to implementation of the core systems of the organization. This large-scale, end-to-end program was needed to reassess the technology utilized by the organization. The implementation process, which included transforming the platform for the enterprise’s group business setup, took about 3 years to complete.
Stabilizing the technology function, as the Head of IT, at a time when there was a lot of commotion already, including the introduction of the GST Bill, acting steady and keeping his team’s spirit up was something he believes to be a high point in his career.
The decision to move from an on-premise data center to a public hyper-scale cloud, when it had not been tried by any organization in the Indian Insurance sector, was quite daunting. However, despite resistance, due to the fear of failure, they went ahead with it and completed it in record 90 calendar days, making them the trendsetter in their own right.
The B2C retail digital platform, launched in 2016, is an accomplishment that he considers being close to his heart. “Getting this done, in the time frame that we were looking at – of about 3 to 4 months… to make this entire thing operational, delivering a completely seamless experience for the customers, sourcing and servicing these policies digitally… we made that a roaring success,” Bhargava gushes while recalling the experience of building this fully digital platform.
At the end of the day, being a CIO is not an easy job. Speaking on how he de-stresses after a day’s work, he says, “My biggest stress buster is my little son, who has grown too fast now! He’s going to turn 10 soon, so I try spending as much time with him as possible doing anything, whether it be reading or watching tv or playing computer games that I don’t understand…”, he chuckles. “I make it a point to catch up with my sister regularly. She made sure we were never out of trouble or fun and kept me on my toes and partnered in crimes (most of them) as we grew up.”
Bhargava may not have excelled at sports as a child but he is starting to get into the groove for indoor sports like badminton and squash and even outdoor ones like cricket, even though he may not find himself to be quite good at it. Lockdown has paved the way for a new hobby, in the form of cycling, which he feels to be a form of meditation on the saddle. Egged on and supported by two of his closest friends and cycling buddies, he signed up for 600 km BRM, to be completed in 40 hours from start to end and finished in time. He admits, “I think, in my sporting life, this is my biggest ever feat, but best is yet to come”. His wife remains a strong pillar of support as he looks at pursuing this hobby with more passion.
“In elementary terms, I think what works for me every single time is, whatever I’m planning to do, if that is going to make me better in any respect, then I am all for it”.
