Vikram Talwar had already sold EXL. Then he had to save it.

By the time Vikram Talwar needed to rescue EXL, he had already sold it. The company he and Rohit Kapoor founded in 1999 had become part of the American insurer Conseco in 2001. Then its new owner ran into trouble. The apparent reward for starting a business turned into an awkward question: how much of that business would survive its customer?

Talwar and his partners bought EXL back in 2002, before Conseco filed for bankruptcy that December. Looking back in 2011, he described beginning again with 1,500 employees, clients to replace and money for about six months. The founders had acquired their own company and, with it, a payroll that required rather more than a convincing presentation.

In his account, they decided against laying off employees. Norwich Union, later Aviva, became an early customer of the rebuilt business. Insurance developed into a central part of EXL’s work. It is a founding story with an inconvenient extra act: first build the company, then sell it, then discover that you still have to build it.

That second beginning gives Talwar’s career its shape. He had spent decades inside large institutions before attempting one of his own. Now the question was whether the experience accumulated in those institutions could help a young company endure a problem that enthusiasm alone could hardly solve.

The banker who kept missing retirement

Talwar graduated from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi and completed his MBA at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad in 1970. He then spent 26 years at Bank of America. His assignments took him across Asia, including a country manager role in India. By the time he became an entrepreneur, working across borders was familiar territory.

The sequence matters. Outsourcing asked a client to trust people working elsewhere with activities that still had to go right, every day. Banking had given Talwar a long acquaintance with international organizations and their operations. His professional preparation for EXL stretched back considerably further than the company’s incorporation papers.

Ernst & Young Consulting came next. He served as CEO and managing director in India from 1998 to 1999 and as Asia director of its Global Operate Business. His move into outsourcing therefore followed work inside both banking and consulting. Each chapter put him closer to the business he would eventually help establish.

The leisure plan was less successful. Talwar liked golf, yet in 2011 he said work took him travelling for roughly 300 days a year. Cooking offered another diversion. He joked, “I like to cook, so I cooked up a company.” For someone contemplating more time on the course, entrepreneurship had proved a remarkably elaborate scheduling error.

The warning was there before the collapse

In February 2002, EXL was discussing expansion, contact centers and higher value work in insurance and consumer finance. Talwar was also talking about reducing its dependence on Conseco. More than 90 percent of revenue then came from work for that single customer. The ambition was to build a broader client base.

That contemporary snapshot complicates the tidy version of a turnaround. Concentration was already an acknowledged issue while EXL was still planning growth. A customer could supply the volume that made expansion possible and simultaneously leave the supplier exposed. The very relationship filling the offices could threaten their future.

A young services company has a particular dilemma here. Winning a substantial customer is proof that the proposition works. Hiring people to serve that customer makes the proof tangible. Yet every additional team built around the same relationship can increase the cost of losing it. Success and vulnerability arrive wearing the same visitor badge.

The buyback with Oak Hill Capital Partners and FTVentures changed EXL’s ownership again. It also returned the founders to the task of winning work on a wider basis. The company’s next chapter depended on customers choosing the people and capabilities it already possessed.

The back office gets its own ambitions

By 2007, EXL’s annual results described 38 new client wins. The company was combining transformation work with outsourcing: helping customers change a process while also taking responsibility for running it. There was more to the proposition than supplying enough desks and answering enough calls.

For Talwar, operational work deserved its own expertise. In 2011 he argued that software companies could find business process outsourcing difficult to understand. His emphasis was on the accumulated knowledge required to deliver complicated work reliably. Technology supplied part of the machinery; knowing the work supplied another.

This is an unfashionably practical distinction. A process can look simple from a distance and become complicated the instant someone must handle its exceptions. An insurance operation, for example, needs consistency as well as speed. Experience becomes useful precisely where a neat diagram stops anticipating what will happen next.

EXL’s direction made that experience part of what it sold. The company had listed on Nasdaq in 2006. It now had public shareholders to answer to alongside customers and employees. A founder’s conviction was meeting the less romantic disciplines of reporting results, developing managers and explaining how the next stage of growth would work.

A new job for the founder

On May 1, 2008, Talwar became executive chairman and Kapoor became president and CEO. EXL presented the appointments as the outcome of an internal succession plan. Talwar’s remit would concentrate on longer term strategy and vision, while his co-founder took the chief executive’s responsibilities.

The accompanying changes extended beyond the two founders. Pavan Bagai became chief operating officer, and the organization was being arranged for its next stage. That detail helps explain the handover: the company was building a management structure around the work, rather than merely exchanging the words beneath two names.

The same month, Talwar was named a finalist for the Metro New York Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. It was a public acknowledgment of the business he had helped establish. The succession announcement offered a different sort of achievement, one that rarely fits as neatly on a commemorative plaque.

A founder can remain useful while changing jobs. Talwar’s progression made room for that possibility. He could contribute to strategy without continuing as CEO. The arrangement also gave Kapoor a defined role at the top, supported by the partner with whom he had begun the venture.

Learning to leave the chair

In October 2010, EXL announced a further transition. Talwar would become non-executive chairman on April 1, 2011. The company then served more than 100 clients globally. Six months were set aside for the transfer of responsibilities to Kapoor and the management team.

The dates reveal a gradual withdrawal from executive duties. First came the move from CEO to executive chairman in 2008. Then came the non-executive role in 2011. Responsibility changed in stages, giving the organization a way to use the founder’s experience while allowing other managers to carry more of the business.

Talwar put his view of leadership plainly: “A leader has to be seen.” He also argued that leaders needed to recognize when it was time to leave. Taken together, those positions make a demanding job description: participate visibly, help people do the work, and avoid treating continued presence as a permanent entitlement.

On February 5, 2014, he retired from EXL’s board. Garen Staglin succeeded him as chairman. The company’s announcement described an organization with more than 21,000 employees and over 30 offices and delivery centers around the world. The enterprise was now large enough to make the founders’ departure from particular jobs a matter of corporate continuity.

“A leader has to be seen.”

Vikram Talwar · 2011

An operating education put to work

Harkness Capital Partners lists Talwar as a founding partner and operating investor, as well as a board advisor to Southwest Foodservice Excellence. His biography there brings the earlier jobs together: banking, consulting and the leadership of EXL. The experience has become part of an investment practice.

Harkness looks for lower middle market companies at points where its team can help management accelerate growth. That is a recognizable setting for someone whose career has included expanding operations, rebuilding a client base and handing responsibilities to other executives. The investment role draws on a long apprenticeship in running things.

There is a useful modesty in the term operating investor. It suggests questions about what managers will actually do with capital: which customers to pursue, which capabilities to develop, which decisions to delegate. Talwar’s EXL years supply examples of how consequential those questions become when circumstances stop cooperating.

The plan only went so far

When EXL marked 25 years in 2024, Kapoor recalled that he and Talwar had imagined what the company might become over five or ten years. Its eventual scale, with more than 50,000 employees globally and a business centered on data and AI, lay beyond what he had pictured at the start.

That recollection suits a company whose founders had to buy it back before it was four years old. Plans were necessary, but they were repeatedly overtaken by events. The continuity came from the people who kept working, the customers who chose them and the willingness to rearrange the business around new circumstances.

Talwar’s story contains both the confidence to begin after a long corporate career and the patience to change his relationship with the thing he built. The sale was a transaction. The recovery took people. The succession took time. Somewhere along the way, the golf calendar appears to have lost another argument.