Vijay Oddiraju

With a track record of successful entrepreneurship and a passion for all things innovative, it's hardly surprising that Vijay Oddiraju heads one of the world’s leading financial technology companies. 

The savvy CEO admits his success is not only rooted in taking opportunities as soon as they arise, but also in his innate sense of optimism, which he says has carried him through many tricky situations. 

Perhaps the most notable was the launch of Volante, which took place very soon after 9/11 and the dotcom crash. Rather than biding their time and waiting for the market to improve, Oddiraju and his fellow-founders saw potential in the downturn: they launched Volante in the immediate wake of the dotcom dip, with the economy still in the grip of a recession, in the belief that it was in fact an opportunity to serve a marketplace which clearly needed the benefits of digital financial modernisation.

This enthusiastic self-belief paid off. Indeed, the post-9/11 environment welcomed it. “The sense of togetherness at that time was remarkable,” Oddiraju recalls. “Initially, we set up in Palo Alto, California, and shortly afterward, we moved to New York to be closer to our customers. We knocked on doors with our products and were welcomed in by business owners who were keen to explore new possibilities and support newcomers. The culture of the time was very embracing of new ideas – and, because the innovations of Volante were recognised, we got off to a great start.”

Many of those initial customers, some of which were large banking corporations, have remained with Volante Technologies ever since – a testimony to the company’s quality of service, ethos and dedication to innovation. 

Trust in an unstable marketplace

Having weathered several storms since, including the 2008 crash, the global pandemic and the current volatility of the cost-of-living crisis, Volante is a company that looks to the future and considers constant evolution an imperative part of the scale-up strategy. 

Trust is critical, too, because as a company that supplies cutting-edge mission-critical technology solutions to banks and financial institutions, reliability of service is essential. Oddiraju points out that, within the current ecosystem, there's a huge development community of engineers that play a critical role as innovators, brainstorming new solutions and challenging existing technologies. And they are a core part of Volante’s future strategy.

“We are developing a huge community of developers who work with us on the local platform so that it'll help our customers in a better fashion. Much higher levels of acceleration will happen as time moves forward, and we will be at the forefront of that,” he concludes.

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