Returning to an old employer can sound like a retreat. For Rajesh Chandiramani, it was a way to get moving. When he explained his return to Tech Mahindra in 2015, he talked about knowing the management team and wanting an entrepreneurial environment. Familiarity had a practical value: fewer introductions, a shorter distance between an idea and the people who could help make it happen.
That is an interesting starting point for an executive whose present assignment involves changing how an established company works. Chandiramani, known as RC, became Comviva’s chief executive in June 2024. He inherited a business with a quarter-century behind it. Starting again, in this case, meant working with accumulated experience while deciding which habits deserved another quarter-century.
His public career suggests a recurring question: how do you move a large organization without treating everyone inside it as furniture? The answer he is pursuing at Comviva involves products, customers, partnerships and people. The vocabulary has changed since his European sales days. The difficulty of getting those four things to move together has survived quite comfortably.
The advantage of a second entrance
Chandiramani worked at Tech Mahindra from 2005 to 2011, before a spell at Capgemini and a return to lead continental European business. In his 2015 account, he described responsibilities across European sales and Asia-Pacific markets. He credited his existing relationships with helping him settle back in and spoke about building a stronger local team.
Europe matters in this story because it was already a place where he had to turn a corporate growth ambition into relationships on the ground. A region on a presentation slide looks conveniently uniform. A customer meeting makes it considerably less so. Different markets bring different expectations, and a local team can hear distinctions that a distant strategy document misses.
His later responsibilities at Tech Mahindra ranged across communications, media and entertainment markets, as well as global digital businesses including cloud and data analytics. The work put him at the meeting point of technical capability and commercial demand. A technology can be interesting for years before anyone has a compelling reason to buy it.
He also has an academic pairing suited to that junction: electronics and telecommunications engineering, followed by marketing management at the University of Mumbai. Management development programs at Harvard Business School and Michigan’s Ross school added another layer. There is a pleasing practicality to the combination. Understand the system. Understand the buyer. Then attempt the much harder task of making their expectations agree.
Before the platforms, the people
A small episode from Capgemini offers a different view of his work. In April 2013, when he was senior vice president for marketing and sales in India, the company launched an employee campaign built around real stories of professional and personal challenges. Chandiramani spoke about showing prospective employees the environment available for professional growth.
Employer advertising can become a parade of smiling people who appear never to have encountered a difficult Tuesday. This campaign’s stated interest in actual challenges is the useful detail. It treated the employee’s experience as something to explain, rather than simply placing a company name above a promise.
Years later, his Comviva communications returned to talent, ownership and clarity. In a public post about the company’s renewed employee proposition, he described growth through people taking opportunities and reinventing their paths. The phrase attached to it was “Rise. Reinvent. Outshine.” Three verbs, and rather more work than the slogan’s brevity lets on.
The connection is worth examining without turning it into a personality legend. His public statements show an interest in how employees understand their place in a business. That becomes especially relevant when the business is asking them to alter its products and processes. An organization chart can assign responsibility. It cannot, by itself, make the assignment persuasive.
A handover with history attached
Comviva announced his appointment as CEO and whole-time director effective June 1, 2024. He succeeded Manoranjan “Mao” Mohapatra, who retired from the executive role and remained on the board as a non-executive director. The transition coincided with the company’s 25th anniversary.
An anniversary is excellent material for a cake and a complicated moment for a new chief executive. There is a history to respect, a business to keep operating, and a future that cannot be supplied by the commemorative brochure. Chandiramani’s assignment was to lead the next phase of a company already embedded in customers’ operations.
By November 2024, Comviva had appointed Raja Mansukhani as chief strategy, technology and transformation officer to help execute Comviva 2.0. Bringing those responsibilities together gave the program a named leadership role. It also illustrated the scale of the coordination involved: the technology roadmap and the business plan needed to meet somewhere other than a quarterly slide deck.
This is the less photogenic part of executive work. Growth plans require choices about who owns the work, how progress is reviewed, and what changes first. A new title is only the beginning. Its value depends on whether decisions become easier to make and whether teams can see how their work fits the larger direction.
Six platforms, one change of habit
In January 2025, Chandiramani described a concrete starting point for the SaaS transition: six of Comviva’s 14 platforms had been selected. He discussed combining software, infrastructure and services in bundled pricing, expanding geographically, and exploring sectors beyond banking and telecom, including retail and consumer packaged goods.
The distinction between selling a platform and operating it as a service is consequential. A purchase can have a ceremonial finish: the contract, the deployment, the photograph. A service keeps asking for attention. Updates, reliability, integration and the customer’s daily experience become part of the continuing relationship.
For Chandiramani, that makes the commercial model a question of organizational habits as well as packaging. Teams must think about what customers experience after the initial agreement. The sales conversation and the engineering conversation need enough common ground that neither leaves the other with a promise it cannot keep.
In June 2025, Comviva announced an AWS partnership supporting AI development and its SaaS transition across products including BlueMarble, MobiLytix and mobiquity. That gave the strategy an implementation route through cloud infrastructure and tooling. The sensible test remains practical: can a customer adopt an offering, use it reliably and receive improvements without turning each change into a new ordeal?
Platforms selected for the SaaS transition. A dated plan, rather than a count of completed migrations.
A growth map with people inside it
In his 2025 conversation with Frost & Sullivan, Chandiramani described the ambition to double Comviva’s size over the following three years. He also outlined a geographic shift toward Europe, the Americas and other developed markets. These were ambitions he articulated, with future execution still required.
They connect to his earlier European experience, but they ask a different question. Leading regional business gives an executive a view of customers. Making products travel asks whether the product itself, its delivery model and the people supporting it can meet expectations elsewhere.
He discussed culture workshops with AWS and emphasized customer focus, innovation and empathy. The word empathy deserves some attention in a technology business. It is useful when it means understanding why a customer resists a change, or why a team needs a clearer explanation. It becomes decorative when it never affects a decision.
By April 2026, Comviva was describing Horizon 2.0, with expansion beyond telecom and banking into retail, travel and logistics, and reporting a strategic win with UPS in the United States. That is a more specific development than a map with arrows. It gives the diversification discussion a customer and a sector, while leaving the longer growth ambition open to assessment.
The wallet at the end of the strategy
A January 2026 launch in Oman brings the platform discussion closer to ordinary life. Global Money Exchange introduced Global Pay, powered by Comviva’s mobiquity Pay. The announcement described local and international payments, bill and educational-fee payments without requiring a bank account, and merchant QR payments across providers.
Chandiramani presented the launch as part of enabling financial institutions in the Middle East to expand digital services and support inclusion. The everyday uses matter. An executive can talk about digital transformation indefinitely; paying a utility bill supplies a rather efficient examination of what the words mean.
This is also where the business-to-business nature of his work becomes visible. Comviva supplies technology to another organization, which offers a service to its own customers. The person using the app may have no reason to know who built the underlying platform. Their interest is in finishing the task.
That distance between supplier and end user makes customer understanding harder and more necessary. A technical feature has to survive several translations before it becomes a useful experience. Chandiramani’s engineering and marketing background makes an apt lens for reading this work: the mechanism and its meaning have to arrive together.
When the AI conversation reaches the accounts
In June 2026, Comviva’s global CMO survey placed an awkward pair of figures together. Ninety percent of surveyed organizations had increased AI marketing investment over two years; only 12 percent could demonstrate its impact. The study covered more than 200 senior IT and business executives in telecom and retail or e-commerce.
These are survey findings, rather than results for Comviva’s own products. They nevertheless frame an important question for a CEO promoting AI: what evidence will justify the investment? Chandiramani’s response emphasized measurement frameworks, data foundations and connecting expenditure to business metrics.
“accountability and outcomes will define success”Rajesh Chandiramani, June 2026
The tension is useful. A supplier benefits when customers adopt technology. A durable relationship also needs customers to understand what they received for the money. A promising demonstration and a defensible business outcome belong to different stages of the conversation.
In July 2026, he joined KPN CIO Paul Bosch and TM Forum’s Ed Finegold to discuss moving agentic AI from pilots into wider operations. AI literacy, organizational change and governance featured alongside personalization. The conversation returned to an old management problem in newer language: people must be able to use a system, trust it and judge its results.
What starting again actually asks
Read across these episodes and Chandiramani’s career becomes more interesting than a succession of titles. His return to Tech Mahindra was grounded in existing relationships. His Comviva agenda asks those relationships to support changes in products, markets and working habits.
There is an appealingly ordinary challenge underneath the corporate terminology. Someone has to understand the customer’s problem. Someone has to build the answer. Someone has to make sure it works after everyone leaves the conference booth. The chief executive’s responsibility includes keeping those people in the same conversation.
Comviva 2.0 remains a program whose ambitions can be judged over time. For now, the public record offers decisions, partnerships, launches and an increasingly explicit demand for measurement. RC’s next chapter will depend on how those pieces perform together. Starting again is easy to announce. Giving the announcement a useful daily life is the work.