Clearwater Analytics, a fintech Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company that provides automated investment accounting and risk reporting, has entered India and will invest $25 million over next three years, a top official said.

This US-headquartered private owned company plans to invest the amount in National Capital Region (NCR) and by March 2020 bring on board about 200 professionals, majority of high-end tech developers, it's Chief Executive Officer Sandeep Sahai said.

“We just opened in India (in NCR). We have 45 people right now in India. We hope to have 90 in next 35 days. And 200 people (all lateral hires) by March 2020”, Sahai told BusinessLine here.

Sahai said that Clearwater Analytics caters to large corporations such as pension funds, insurance companies and investment managers – anyone with large pools of assets and invest the money among multiple money managers.

As a B2B company, Clearwater Analytics has very high corporate penetration. Of the world’s Fortune 500 companies, 60 per cent are Clearwater’s clients.

“We have a SaaS platform in the cloud. It’s not maintenance or back end work that we are looking to do in India for large corporations in the US. We are doing front end, hardcore SaaS platform development. The analytics we are talking about is high end. So, we need people who have engineering talent, who understands this. That’s why Delhi is useful because lots of banks have set up centres here”, Sahai said.

Simply put, Clearwater Analytics provides integration and aggregation on the cloud. One part is putting data together and other is analytics.

Asked whether the company intends to sell the products or platform developed in Delhi to Indian institutional clients, Sahai replied in the negative.

“So, we have about 800 clients. We have them all in Europe or US and they are mostly US centric ones. A typical client of ours in the US is invested in say 100 countries and would prefer one dashboard that aggregates information across all the markets. You don’t find such type of insurance companies or investment managers in India who is invested in multiple countries”, he said.

Sahai said that Clearwater Analytics is investing in India mostly for the talent pool and those who understand software development and core financial instruments.

“In India, today,we aren’t looking at the backend work and offices. That we can get with other companies as well. How many people in the world understand derivatives investments? How many people understand complex assets? Very few and rare. We find them in India and such people are used to write software”, he said.

In India, one big advantage that a firm can get is the ability to scale for talented people. “In the US, it could have taken us probably a year to get 200 high end tech developers. This could be achieved in India at faster time, say in months”, he noted.

Clearwater Analytics is mainly looking for lateral hires with good understanding of derivatives, fixed income instruments and other complexities.

“Our aim is to be in SaaS world where you are trying to build highest quality global software”, he said.

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