Babul Balakrishnan, a customer experience leader at Thunes, a B2B fintech specialising in real-time cross-border remittance, talks to The Ortus Club about why chasing quality rather than speed is the only sustainable strategy in payments, how AI can be deployed responsibly inside a highly regulated environment, and why the most important question any leader can ask is whether they truly stand behind the people they claim to value. Drawing on 26 years across logistics, telco, and fintech, Babul makes the case for leading with empathy and treating customer experience as a strategic driver, not a support function.
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Executive Summary: Key Takeaways
- Quality Over Speed: Competing on cost trades away quality, and in remittance, you are playing with people’s money. Chase quality first, and speed and everything else eventually fall into place.
- CX as a Strategic Driver: Customer experience has an immediate, measurable impact — if the function pauses, volumes, escalations, and complaints spike at once, unlike functions whose absence is felt only over time.
- AI Starts Internally: In a highly regulated, data-sensitive environment, customer-facing AI must wait. The near-term value lies in internal efficiency, knowledge-sharing, and guiding engineers — underpinned by a proper governance framework.
- Empowerment Through Trust: Babul’s leadership style is to empower the team, remove roadblocks, find the right stakeholders, and then get out of the way — once trust has been earned.
- Closing the Generational Gap: New professionals should understand the organisation, play to their strengths, and network across functions; experienced leaders must unlearn old assumptions and stay open-minded to a workforce that values culture and work-life balance.
- People as the Real Metric: Many organisations say people are central, but few get behind it. A genuinely people-focused business supports growth and lets the numbers follow.
Babul Balakrishnan’s 26-year career has moved through some of the most operationally demanding sectors of the global economy. After a year at Monsanto, he spent close to 14 years at DHL, joining DHL Express in Brussels and working across HR, IT, and customer service before relocating to Singapore. A sales role at Dell followed, then a return to DHL for operations and, later, business development and fulfilment sales within DHL e-commerce.
After two and a half years in a startup focused on customer experience, he joined Thunes, where he has spent close to five years. An extrovert who draws energy from the people around him, Babul leads with empathy and a finger on the pulse. A philosophy forged, in part, by learning from the bad managers he was determined never to imitate.
Why is ‘challenging’ the one word you would use to describe your role?
Babul explains why customer experience perpetually operates on the back foot, and why that tension is unlikely to ease.
“Customer experience in any organisation is always challenging, even more so in a startup. When you have a great product or service idea and want to get it off the ground, you cannot invest a lot of time and money in operations because you do not know how the product will scale, or if it will scale at all. So you hire the sales, you find the customer, you generate the revenue. And then you create a problem, because now you need customer service.
It always starts on the back foot, which is painful, because you are always playing catch-up. And it always remains a catch-up game, because the service keeps moving, and customer experience always tries to catch up. In a small organisation, there is usually one central technical team and one central product team, and you have to fight to get your work prioritised. What wins at the end of the day are revenue-generating activities, not operational ones. So you are constantly trying to improve things while facing criticism over why things are not working. I do not see it improving in the near future.”
How is CX a strategic driver rather than a support function?
With finance, HR, product, and marketing all competing to be seen as the strategic driver, Babul points to the immediacy of impact as CX’s distinctive claim.
“If we do not show up to work, there is an immediate impact to the customer. If HR does not show up, employees may feel the pinch, which eventually affects the customer, but it is a longer game. If finance does not show up, invoices may go unpaid, and it becomes a problem two or three months in.
But if I give my whole team one week off, everyone is going to feel the pain across the board. The numbers will drop, the volumes will go up, the escalations will go up, customers will complain. There is an immediate effect, and that is what I use to my advantage”
Where do you draw the line between disciplined process and room for bold ideas?
Babul describes his role as a gatekeeper who must defend the processes that exist for good reason while staying open to challenging them.
“That is always a tricky balance. When you bring in a team, you put processes and systems in place so things become standardised. But very quickly, you start preaching those processes when someone wants something slightly different. So it is my job to be the gatekeeper to see it and call it out while also getting behind the processes we have put in place, because they exist for a good reason.
Where a customer may be inconvenienced because of a process, or a salesperson feels the system is inhibiting the service or quality we can provide, then that is an open conversation I need to have with my team. They may come up with good arguments where they agree or disagree, and then we have to find a way forward.”
How do you decide where AI can genuinely help without breaking trust?
Operating in a highly regulated, data-sensitive space, Babul sees the immediate value of AI internally rather than in customer-facing use.
“There are two places AI can potentially be used: externally (customer-facing) and internally. Customer-facing is always very tricky. We operate in a highly regulated environment with a lot of personal information at stake, so we cannot afford any kind of leakage.
Internally, we are looking at how to make our employees’ lives more efficient; keeping people employed but giving them tools to do more with their time. If an analysis takes a couple of days, can we squeeze it down to 15 minutes so they can spend more time engaging with stakeholders? Every company has knowledge sitting across multiple systems; can we bring it into one place and have AI provide succinct answers?
We are also looking at AI from a coding perspective to guide our engineers on the right practice. And we are setting up an AI governance framework within Thunes, which is very important. Being in a highly regulated space, we need to understand what we can and cannot do.”
After so many years of little to no change, what is different about cross-border payments now?
Babul welcomes genuine gains in speed but warns that the race to be cheaper risks compromising the one thing that matters most: quality.
“It is definitely getting faster, for sure. Every company is moving into the digital space, governments are incentivised to stop printing cash, and they can take a cut every time money moves. So speed has genuinely improved over the last couple of years.
My problem with cheaper is that every time you trade on cost, you trade on quality as well, and we are playing with people’s money. A construction worker in a different country may be sending ten dollars home, and ten dollars is a lot. We cannot afford to lose that because we want to be fast and cheap. So within Thunes, we focus more on quality, and we are in dialogue with our partners to bring them to the same level, where quality takes greater precedence. If you chase speed, you may negotiate on quality, but if you chase quality, ultimately everything else should fall into place.”
How do you close the gap between what young professionals expect and what they find?
Having delivered talks to new graduates, Babul shares the guidance he offers on navigating the corporate environment.
“That was the exact thought I had a couple of years ago, which is why I reached out to SMU to do talks for new graduates. There is definitely a gap between the established way of working and the very different expectations of the new generation coming in. The key points I raised were: first, spend time understanding the organisation; understand your strength and how you can provide value using it, because if you can become an important resource, the company will get behind you.
Then network. Get to know everyone in every function and how they contribute to the company’s objectives, because by getting to know people, you ensure they get to know you. And that stakeholder engagement matters, especially at performance-management time. The trickier point is work-life balance: it is important, and I believe in it, but if you go in preaching it as soon as you enter an organisation, it can create a very different perspective of where you are coming from.”
What do experienced leaders need to unlearn?
Babul turns the question on his own generation, asking honestly whether long-held habits can be unlearned at all.
“What they need to unlearn is that the way they used to work and the way the world works today are very different. Culture was never a thing when I started working; it is now, and culture is for everyone to build. It is my responsibility, and it would be yours too. People of my generation need to understand that the new generation works very differently. You have to be vocal about the benefits you provide, and you have to understand where they are coming from when they talk about work-life balance, because it is a real thing with real effects.
Being open to feedback, open to questions, and transparent matters, because there is far less that is confidential now than there used to be. As long as you are open-minded, and that is the challenge, because how do you teach anyone to be open-minded? Open-mindedness was not a skill anyone looked for when these people started working; it was simply, ‘Will you get the job done?’”
Is there one question you believe every leader in your industry should be asking themselves?
Babul closes the gap between what organisations say about people and what they are willing to do for them.
“My question would be this: if you truly think people matter to your organisation, how far are you going to go to show those people that they matter? We hear all these PR-friendly terms on LinkedIn: people being the centre of the organisation, the nerve of the business. But then redundancies happen, people get laid off without any structured thinking behind it, and those become the headlines. Those are not the kind of headlines you want when you have said people are central to your organisation.
Right now, it is a very numbers-driven game, but if you actually focused on people, on their growth, and gave them the support they need, would the numbers not automatically come up? I may be idealistic, but I like to think that is how it works. So why are we not focusing more on people, doing more for them, making them feel part of a bigger family? And why do we have so many rules and obligations when we hire adults to come in?”
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As Babul’s perspective shows, the hardest questions in customer experience and fintech, such as balancing speed against quality, deploying AI responsibly, and genuinely putting people first, are rarely resolved in isolation. They demand candid, peer-level dialogue with leaders facing the same pressures across regulated, fast-moving industries.
His conviction that quality must lead and that people are the real measure of an organisation reflects a broader reality: the most effective CX and operations leaders actively seek out honest conversation to test their thinking and refine how they execute.
At The Ortus Club, we host curated executive roundtables that bring together senior leaders facing these exact challenges. Step away from the catch-up game and engage in the kind of open, high-value conversations that move both strategy and people forward.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why does Thunes prioritise quality over speed in cross-border payments?
A: Competing primarily on cost forces trade-offs on quality, and remittance involves people’s money. Often small, vital sums sent home by workers. Prioritising quality protects trust, and reliable speed tends to follow.
Q: Why is customer-facing AI difficult in cross-border fintech?
A: The sector is highly regulated and handles significant personal data, so the risk of leakage makes customer-facing AI hard to deploy. Most mature AI use cases are also B2C-focused, while B2B presents different challenges.
Q: How can AI add value internally within a regulated organisation?
A: By improving employee efficiency, consolidating scattered knowledge into a single accessible source, and guiding engineers on best practices, all supported by a clear AI governance framework.
Q: What advice helps new professionals close the expectations gap?
A: Understand the organisation, identify and apply your strengths to become a valued resource, and network across every function so colleagues know you, which strengthens stakeholder engagement and performance reviews.
Q: What is the single question Babul believes every leader should ask?
A: If people truly matter to your organisation, how far are you willing to go to show them that they do? And does management’s follow-through match the words?
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