With job-ready courses, Raipur-based NIBF is helping banks meet their skilling needs

It was while working as a branch head at a leading private bank that Biswajit Chattaraj noticed that most of the time the branch was functioning with half the workforce than what is required. He saw new faces being recruited and they often left shortly after joining. As he moved ranks, the problem continued to surface. For Biswajit, the challenge was that of a skill gap.

"I saw that when a new professional joined the organisation, while he/she knew what they had to achieve, they didn't know how to achieve it. It wasn't uncommon for these young professionals to find themselves lost and more often than not they would leave the job. Being short-staffed made it difficult for the rest of the teams to work optimally," explains Biswajit.

With more than a decade of experience in the banking industry, Biswajit believed that the skill gap could be fixed by offering the right training and education to candidates appearing for various banking examinations. Convinced that he had a robust business plan, Biswajit left his job and launched the Raipur-based National Institute of Banking and Finance (NIBF) in 2012.

Incidentally, he found an eager co-founder in a former colleague, Satendra Shrivastava. The two leveraged their years of experience and insights to build job-focused courses that groomed aspirants to become lifelong learners while equipping them with the right knowledge, skills and qualifications to excel in the banking and financial services industry. "While I deal with the business development side of the company, Satendra works more with the content, academia and operations."

Grooming job-ready professionals

The company made strides by partnering with leading banks to offer personalised courses that include insights from industry professionals. Under these partnerships, NIBF also got to train professionals hired by these banks and help the former expand their learning skills.

"We wanted to create a bridge between the banking industry and the academic interface," he adds. However, the duo was in for a rough start as there weren't many takers for these courses initially. "It took us some time but we were finally able to rope in clients by convincing them about the need for industry-ready candidates," says Biswajit.

A factor that helped NIBF boost its prospects was having an interactive website with a .in domain name. "We were based out of Raipur and most of our clients were in bigger cities like Mumbai and Delhi. So, the website helped us reach out to more clients, while a .in extension enabled us to establish ourselves as an Indian brand," he adds.

Plus, they got to choose the name they wanted with a .in extension. "It helped us with brand recall and enabled prospective clients to locate us online easily," says Biswajit.

The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) has helped hundreds of businesses across sectors and sizes distinguish themselves as a brand with its .in or .Bharat domain — which is India’s Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD). It’s among the only internet exchanges in the world to offer a ccTLD in multiple languages.

Scaling new heights with a digital presence

Having a .in domain name also helped the company during the COVID-19 pandemic, when social distancing made physical classes difficult. "But, we are seeing the demand recovering as the industry starts warming up to online training. Having a .in extension makes it easy to locate us and generate leads. We think things are likely to improve in the near future," says a hopeful Biswajit.

Biswajit says that a .in extension is a useful growth driver for small and budding brands who are looking to scale with limited resources. “Given the huge potential that the Indian market represents, a .in extension is a fitting tool to tap that opportunity. When you opt for a .in domain name, your clients know that you’re an India-based brand that is launched by Indians and made for Indians,” he adds.

The company aims to grow as employment partners for students living in semi-urban and rural areas of the country by offering impactful yet affordable courses.

The ‘Shaping India Inc's Online Growth’ series chronicles the journeys of startups and SMEs in India and how creating an online presence on the .in or .Bharat domain powered their success stories.