Kirit Ruparelia and the business worth building twice

Selling a business supplies a convenient ending. Kirit Ruparelia put another beginning next to his. United Clearing, the mobile roaming finance company he founded, was sold to Billing Services Group in 2006. In 2007, he founded Nextgen Clearing. The dates sit almost shoulder to shoulder. For anyone expecting the acquisition to be followed by a long disappearance, the next entry in the career history is rather inconvenient.

His chosen subject was the accounting that follows a mobile phone across a border. A customer uses another operator’s network; the operators then have to work out the commercial consequences. Records, agreements, bills and payments must agree with one another. Ruparelia has built two companies around helping them do so. It is an occupation with few opportunities for applause at the airport, although plenty of opportunities for an argument later.

Nextgen now reports more than 150 mobile operator customers and over 300 employees worldwide. Those numbers give the second venture some scale. The more revealing detail belongs to the first: one customer thought so much of Ruparelia’s service that he became an investor in the next company. A relationship had survived the transaction and acquired a new job.

The customer who crossed the table

Keith Greenfield’s account of working with Ruparelia at United Clearing is pleasantly specific. If something went wrong, Ruparelia made sure his team responded quickly. Greenfield subsequently invested his own money in Nextgen. His recommendation connects that decision to the way Ruparelia ran United, then describes the same attention to service in the new business.

There is a useful distinction between a customer who renews and a customer who invests. Renewal expresses satisfaction with a service. Investment adds exposure to the business delivering it. Greenfield’s account makes that transition unusually concrete: the experience of being looked after became a reason to back the person doing the looking after.

Andrew Bramley, who worked at Orange, supplies another view of the same approach. United Clearing won Orange’s business with a proposal to improve service at a reasonable cost. Bramley says Ruparelia delivered. The commercial relationship also became a friendship. Neither recommendation requires an elaborate theory of charisma. Both describe promises followed by action, which is a respectable foundation for a reputation.

“We’re an outsourced finance department for the roaming function.”

Kirit Ruparelia, describing United Clearing in 2004

A small sentence for a complicated job

In July 2004, United Clearing moved from Ofex to London’s AIM market and raised £750,000. Its customers included Orange UK and O2 Germany, and it had a global framework agreement with Hutchison’s 3. Ruparelia was its managing director. His description of the company was admirably economical: an outsourced finance department for roaming.

The business calculated what operators owed each other, could bill partner networks and arrange payment. Operators paid a monthly fee whose size depended on their roaming agreements. For smaller operators, outsourcing supplied a capability they might struggle to reproduce internally and support when dealing with larger counterparties. Behind the traveller’s connection sat a service business with recurring work.

That early explanation helps make sense of Ruparelia’s career. He found a way to describe a specialised activity in terms a customer’s finance team could recognise. The phone industry could discuss networks; he could discuss the consequences for an account. The commercial opening lay where those conversations met. By 2006, United Clearing had become an acquisition for BSG.

Banking, software, then the bill

Before mobile clearing, Ruparelia spent more than 15 years in banking and software. His employers included Reuters, Quay Financial, NeXT Software and Apple. His biography also records working with Steve Jobs. It is an eye-catching connection in a career devoted largely to work that happens out of the consumer’s sight.

His degree was a BSc Honours in Mathematics and Psychology from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He also chaired eComm Monitor, working with the digital security specialist Professor Vashek Matyas. Numbers, software and people all appear in that background. They would later appear together in a business whose software has to satisfy both technical specialists and the people responsible for collecting money.

The chronology becomes especially interesting at Nextgen’s foundation. Having sold one clearing company, he started another in a field he already understood. The stated ambition was to serve operators’ clearing and settlement needs across domestic and international markets through a combination of software and services. Familiar territory still left room for a different company.

The view from the billing team

By January 2016, Optus had selected Nextgen’s financial clearing, data clearing and IOTRON platforms following a formal tender. The Australian operator was reviewing its roaming operations as discount agreements made the business more complicated. Ruparelia described the contract as a platform for the company in the region and a potential reassurance to other operators considering migration.

Optus’s Cathy Yu explained the appeal in terms of what the billing team could see. Data clearing, discounts and standard monthly clearing would be available together. That complete financial picture was expected to help efficiency, accuracy, reporting and collections. The purchase had a recognisable human purpose: fewer separate pieces to assemble before someone could understand the position.

Nextgen’s IOTRON product brings discount agreements into one place and connects their management with financial clearing. Its financial clearing service includes invoice reconciliation, dispute management, reporting and debt collection. These are adjacent stages of the same commercial journey. Putting them together reduces the distance between a negotiated agreement and the cash it is meant to produce.

A July 2016 announcement about Cellcom Israel made the service element explicit again. The operator wanted automation, a detailed view of roaming finances and help with legacy debt. Ruparelia emphasised the combination of industry knowledge, qualified support teams and flexible customer service. The vocabulary had evolved since United Clearing; the attention to the customer’s working day was familiar.

The practical detail continues into reporting. Nextgen describes financial views organised around each roaming partner, with accruals and profit-and-loss information for finance teams. An operator can examine the relationship behind a balance as well as the balance itself. For the customer, that changes the usefulness of the information: the question becomes which agreement, payment or dispute needs attention. Ruparelia’s original description of an outsourced finance function still offers a useful way into the work.

People alongside the platform

In August 2016, Nextgen appointed Jean Doblustaine as vice-president of sales for Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The appointment strengthened regional support as the company expanded internationally. Ruparelia connected Doblustaine’s experience to operators’ cash flow and revenue. Geography mattered because customers’ needs differed, even when they shared the same broad task.

A later leadership announcement gave Ruparelia a different assignment. When Nextgen named Nick Hoare as CEO with effect from 2 September 2024, succeeding Ashraf Iskander, Ruparelia described his own focus as executive chairman: innovation and strategy as the industry changed. Hoare spoke of working with both Ruparelia and Iskander, who would remain a shareholder and board member. It was another phase in a business that had grown beyond its founding team. For Ruparelia, the announcement put continuing product ideas and the company’s direction at the centre of the chairmanship.

Doblustaine now appears on the leadership page as deputy CEO and group chief revenue officer. Ruparelia is listed as CEO, Founder & Chairman. The team also includes leaders in technology, operations, finance, human resources and product management. The names and responsibilities give some shape to a company whose output is often encountered as a screen, a report or a settled balance.

Ruparelia has also spoken favourably about developing the way a leadership team works. He credits the Lencioni Five Behaviours programme with improving performance and productivity across the business, and recommends it to other leadership teams. The endorsement is a small but telling part of his public record: alongside the systems sold to customers, he has paid attention to the working relationships inside his own organisation.

A meeting room for the next question

Nextgen’s development work has included an organised way to hear from customers. At the 2019 wholesale roaming gathering in Valencia, it launched Nextgen Labs sessions covering billing evolution, data visualisation and machine-to-machine monetisation. The sessions combined product demonstrations with opportunities to listen and learn from customers and industry colleagues.

Those subjects also show how far the conversation had travelled from the early monthly roaming bill. Connected machines brought different traffic; new billing approaches brought different processes; visualisation offered another way to understand the records. For a founder returning to clearing after an exit, the underlying job remained familiar while its contents kept changing.

On 28 January 2026, Nextgen’s AI Assistant received Gold for Best Roaming Solution in Juniper Research’s Future Digital Awards for Telco Innovation. It was recognition for a company product, extending the second venture’s story into another generation of software. There is a pleasing continuity between a finance department described in one sentence in 2004 and a business still finding new tools for the people doing that work.

Ruparelia’s career gives the acquisition date an unusual place in the narrative. The sale of United Clearing is followed immediately by the founding of Nextgen, and then by years of customers, products and colleagues. The thread running through it is service specific enough for a customer to remember. In Greenfield’s case, he remembered it when deciding where to put his own money. That is quite a good reference to take into a second act.