An extensive interview with VEON's CTO Yogesh Malik

1. P30

2. Written by Romily Broad Produced by Glen White
A CLEAN-SHEET
DIGITALTRANSFORMATION

3. 3 1

4. “You know, the word
‘transform’ is used a lot. It’s
everywhere. Transformation. I’m
transforming. You’re transforming.
Everyone’s transforming!
“But it’s the purpose. That’s the key.”
Yogesh Malik stands in a corner
office on the sixth floor of VEON’s
headquarters in Amsterdam,
describing a philosophy that has
helped him drive a root-and-branch
reformation of one of the largest
telcos on the planet. Malik has been
awarded a Group CTO of the Year
2017 by Mobile Europe and has
just been named Oracle’s CIO of
the Year. As he reveals the stunning
scope of the transformation he’s
helping to lead, around us the final
touches are being made to the
decor of a building that now looks
as aspirational as the company’s
brand, products and culture feel.
VEON the platform
The company renamed itself VEON,
from VimpelCom, in February of
this year. A commitment to what the
company calls ‘radical transformation’
is encapsulated in the name – it’s
the brand of its existing personal
internet platform, technology through
which it doesn’t just connect its
customers, it aims to provide world-
beating localised services and liberate
them from such anxieties as going
YOGESH MALIK, 2017’S MOBILE EUROPE
GROUP CTO OF THE YEAR AND ORACLE CIO OF
THE YEAR, IS LEADING A ROOT-AND-BRANCH
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AT ONE OF THE
WORLD’S LARGEST TELCOS, VEON. OBSESSED
WITH HIS CUSTOMERS, MALIK HAS REDEFINED
THE MEANING OF ‘CLEAN-SHEET THINKING’ TO
HELP THE COMPANY SERVE ALL 235MN OF THEM
3 2 D e c e m b e r 2 0 1 7

5. E U R O P E
3 3

6. VIDEO: The Veon platform
dark when the credit runs out.
Years of divestments and
organisational change have led to
this moment – a process focused
squarely on shedding the ballast of
a traditional telco in order to surge
forward as a large but agile technology
company. The VEON platform
leverages powerful data analytics
and artificial intelligence, offering
users a variety of new, personalised
and contextualised services on
anything from entertainment to
financial services using data insight to
predict and satisfy customer needs.
It bundles in messaging
capabilities to enable users to
connect by voice, text, picture and
video through a constantly iterated
proprietary platform. The aim is to
securely provide everything online
at a tap of a finger, and importantly
zero-rating is a ‘fundamental
component of the service’, with
users able to stay online for free
even when they are out of credit.
“That’s key
when you
transform. Keep
the customer,
understand the
forces acting on
them. Forget
about the rest”
YOGESH MALIK
GROUP CTO, VEON
3 4 D e c e m b e r 2 0 1 7
VEON

7. E U R O P E
Emblazoned throughout VEON’s
freshly appointed offices are
reminders of its core values, foremost
among which is to be ‘customer
obsessed’. It’s a purpose that has
fuelled the company’s transformation
and that is made real in VEON’s core
consumer offering, fine-tuned as it is
to the needs of customers across the
frontier markets it serves – majoring
in Russia and Pakistan, but stretching
from Tajikistan to Algeria. It’s also a
major player in Italy, in partnership
with Hutchison under the brand WIND
Tre. It’s where the VEON platform first
cut its teeth. The company employs
around 40,000 people across its 13
territories, under six distinct brands.
Clean-sheet thinking
It’s all a result of what Malik describes
as ‘clean-sheet thinking’, where the
customer’s needs are sacred and
drive decisions from top to bottom.
“It’s about thinking about
your customer and nothing
VIDEO: Clean-sheet thinking
w w w. g i g a b i t . n e t 3 5

8. else,” he says. “Not about your
competition, just the customer.
“See what the customer really
wants, then look at what’s impacting
the customer and what affects their
choices. Is it a competitive thing which
is influencing them? The internet,
their freedom? What is going to make
up the customer’s mind on what to
choose and what not to choose?
“Clean-sheet thinking is something
like the automotive industry
moving towards a completely
electronic car. An electronic car is
nothing but a computer on wheels
and Tesla figured that out.
“It’s very hard for the incumbent
big auto manufacturers to make a
hybrid car. They are building on the
same chassis, they’re constrained
by the engine room, by the back
room. But Tesla clean-sheeted
– they wanted space, a beautiful
dashboard with everything visible
like a computer screen…
“That’s key when you
transform. Keep the customer,
understand the forces acting on
them. Forget about the rest. Then find
a way to provide the best solution for
the customer while being sustainable
and competitive in the marketplace.”
Leading technology
transformation
Malik and VEON’s leadership clean
sheeted their entire organisation and
pivoted it around the needs of their
customers. For a company with over
235mn customers across a wide
variety of territories, embarking on
such a comprehensive reformation
was certainly bold. But Malik is
adamant that VEON represents
more than a rebrand - the company’s
mission, identity, and culture are
ready for the future and the rebrand
is a ribbon on the package.
“VEON is a company where on one
hand we have extremely big size and
diversity - but not only that, we have a
great pioneering spirit. Amongst the
diversity and the scale, we are able
to pioneer new frontiers, and that
makes us very, very special,” he says.
“Now the CTO role for me is
extremely important in this journey.
It’s about moving from conceptual
3 8 D e c e m b e r 2 0 1 7
VEON

10. thinking to delivery and strategizing the next move.
Transformation leadership is central to a CTO role.
“We need to understand software. Coming
from telecoms we were very linked into hardware
and software, coupled together. Those elements
needed to de-couple to understand software
much better as a skill in its own right.
“And we need to be extremely financially
savvy. As a CTO, I cannot just bring ideas to my
CFO, my CEO, which I wouldn’t believe in if it
was my own money. The metrics of customer
engagement, the metrics of brand, the metrics
of return on investment, they need to be very,
very closely felt in the technology strategy in
order to make the transformation real.”
The company’s emergence as a brand – and
platform – called VEON speaks very publicly
about how it can deploy technology to empower
its customers. As it advertises to the world, it
offers customers a chance to “Be Truly Free”.
There is no doubt it’s an ethos very closely
aligned to Malik’s own personal beliefs in terms
of how the company should be operating.
He tells us that as a child in India he endured
frequent trips to doctors to patch up the scrapes of
his adventures. As a result, he aspired to become
a doctor himself at the time, to improve lives and
“excel in solving their problems”. While his career
took a different path, he says the same basic
VEON
Originally
founded as
VimpelCom
The annual
revenue for
VEON (2016)
1992
$8.9
Number of
staff at VEON
40k+
billion
4 2 D e c e m b e r 2 0 1 7

11. E U R O P E
purpose still informs him when leading
technological progress at VEON.
He says passionately: “Who am I
really serving? How can I make my
effort in such a way that I see delight
on the customer’s face? That is a main
driver for me. What do we need to
do next to serve our customer? How
can we make the service better? How
can we make it more effective? How
can we explain things more
easily? How can we inspire?
“For me what holds a lot
of importance is to have a
purpose. Because without a purpose
“VEON is
taking radical
steps to own
its future and
influence the
shape of things
to come”
YOGESH MALIK
Group CTO, VEON
w w w. g i g a b i t . n e t 4 3

12. you cannot really transform anything.
“It’s absolutely key to have a
purpose as a centre, and customer is a
purpose. Then, of course, we need
to have an open-mindedness. We
cannot go into any situation thinking
only one solution would work. We’ve
got to balance things. Sometimes
a local opinion matters, sometimes
a global opinion matters.
“Thirdly, we should walk the
talk. If you don’t do that, we
just kind of stumble preaching
something, it never gets done.
“Have purpose, be very open-
minded, walk the talk, all of the time.”
The future of telecoms
VEON is taking radical steps to
own its future and influence the
shape of things to come. In Malik’s
view there has been a breakdown
in the value chain in the telecoms
industry more generally. OTT content
services are leveraging networks
to build closer relationships with
customers than the network providers
themselves. Infrastructure is installed
and maintained as a commodity
divorced from the needs of their
end users. Devices and sales swirl
competitively around the edges.
The outcome is an increasingly
disengaged customer. The
reincarnation of VEON from
VimpelCom – and all the change that
has occurred under the hood - is
geared around fostering customer
engagement from the grass roots,
by transforming the fundaments
of both company and service.
“As a telecoms industry, we were
given 3G as a tool,” Malik says. “We
were given 4G as a tool and now we
are talking about 5G, but we have
never addressed our core problem:
How do we address customers in a
real-time, personalised manner? How
do we empower our customers and
our consumers more, so that they feel
in control in the same way they feel in
control of their bank account, or their
airline ticket, and how can we take this
customer confidence to the next level?
“That is what we are dealing
with right now and, in my opinion,
if we do not deal with that, we can
keep building networks of new
4 4 D e c e m b e r 2 0 1 7
VEON

13. VEON’s journey to transformation
began as a reaction to the increasing
entropy it perceived in the telecoms
industry, as well as growing headwinds
of currency devaluations in the markets
it calls home. CEO Jean-Yves Charlier
has written that the industry risked
becoming dumb pipes facilitating the real
engagement being driven by fast-growing
OTT players. Meanwhile, VEON – or
VimpelCom as it was then known – was
performing poorly versus its competitors
and was riven with inefficiency.
Itchosetoaggressivelyand
systematicallydisruptitself.It’svision:
“auniquetelco&techcombinationthat
allowstocapturethe“bestofbothworlds”
The company set about massively
improving its capital structure via
the consolidation of its two leading
markets – it launched the WIND Tre
joint venture with Hutchison in Italy and
merged Mobilink and Warid in Pakistan.
It then refreshed its management
team, overhauled its compliance
structures, installed new corporate
values and hugely reduced its costs.
In2016CTOYogeshMalikandhisteam
initiatedgroup-wideimplementation
ofanewdigitalITstack.Itisthelargest
technologytransformationtheindustryhas
everseen,completelyoverhaulinghowthe
companyismanagingitsbusinessglobally.It
isreplacingapatchworklegacyinfrastructure
thathasgrowncountry-by-country with one
central, cloud-based platform. It is bringing
new product development back in-house.
The platform provides the analytics power
to supercharge product development
and helps to realise the company’s goal
of offering streamlined, personalised
services to customers in real-time.
A rebrand to VEON and the global roll-out
of its eponymous personal-internet
platform followed from February 2017.
As the company reported a 9.5% year-on-
year revenue growth for the 9 months
2017, at $7.2bn, the platform surged
to a potential userbase of more than
170mn. It is already stacked with almost
140 content partnerships, and will be
available in all VEON markets in 2018.
An all-new, global tech
company has arrived.
VEON’S TRANSFORMATION
VIDEO: Transformation

14. technologies, but we will never
address a core of the issues. And
the core of that is the IT behind the
networks serving our customers.
“And what can we do with the
data we have? Following all the
regulations, we can personalise
that customer journey. We can
make that customer be the
customer, not a SIM card holder.
“Today, everyone is going after SIM
cards, but actually the customer is
either owned by Apple, or by Google,
or by Yahoo, whatever brand they
identify with. They are not owned
by the telecom operators. This is
“In 12-to-18 months,
I think it’s no longer
going to be green
shoots we’re talking
about, it’s going
to be the new
harvest brought
by this change“
YOGESH MALIK
Group CTO, VEON
VIDEO: The future of telecoms
4 6 D e c e m b e r 2 0 1 7

15. E U R O P E
what we would like to change, and
this next step for us to become a
trusted advisor is going to be key.”
Malik is confident, though, that
change is afoot, and he believes
the reborn VEON can be a pioneer
for this new methodology and way
of thinking across the industry.
It’s not going to happen overnight,
but it has begun. Malik is leading
the charge at a company in a prime
position to succeed. It refers to the
countries it serves as the ‘markets of
the future’ and with its huge, diverse
team and bold technology strategy
it aims to make a dramatic impact.
“Now it’s not just a concept or
a vision, there are actions to back
it up,” he says. “I think that whole
transformation on network, customer
angle, complete ID transformation,
and bringing data to customers’
lives will really give birth to a data-
driven company culture. In fact, that’s
happening right now as we speak.
In 12-to-18 months, I think it’s no
longer going to be green shoots we’re
talking about, it’s going to be the new
harvest brought by this change.
“It’s hard for me to comment on
the strategies of other companies,
but I do understand there are
complexities when you’re sitting on
a huge legacy infrastructure skillset,
and on revenues that you do not
transform too swiftly. You need to be
careful, and passionate, so it will very
much depend if other telcos have the
similar kind of pioneering spirit as us.
“There are a couple of examples
in Asia and the US where companies
are really changing with a huge
vision of conquering the next
horizon as well. Otherwise you will
be a commodity. You will perhaps
be essential to the market, but
you will not be a differentiator.”
By now VEON’s offices, gleaming
in the heart of Amsterdam’s
burgeoning Zuidas business district,
will be resplendent in its final livery.
After we talk, Malik heads straight
to the airport for a flight to Algeria.
He has the look of a man who’s
delivering the future personally.
w w w. g i g a b i t . n e t 4 7