Learning to distinguish receipt from acceptance

I grew up in Bhopal and completed a commerce degree in May 1999. My first job was at Meruqti Document Services, a small contractor handling administrative records for local businesses. I joined the document room in June, preparing receipt lists and locating requested folders under supervision. The work looked repetitive until an apparently simple request could not be completed. A folder label might be accurate while the expected enclosure was missing. I learnt to describe exactly what I had found, rather than allowing a familiar reference number to stand in for an examination of the material.

In April 2004 I became an archive supervisor. I had twelve colleagues and an expenditure allowance for storage supplies and routine handling. The promotion did not give me authority to decide who should receive a client's records. It made me responsible for ensuring that our team checked the instruction, recorded the handover and could explain an exception. I introduced a short end-of-shift review of requests that had been located but not released. The unresolved cases revealed how easily a useful distinction disappears when a single completion count is used for several different stages. When a client disputed a handover, our signed record could establish who received the material, but it could not answer a question about an enclosure we had never checked. That limitation changed how I described our service.

I joined Talruqen Mortgage Operations in July 2009 as a client transition manager. The business was smaller then, with two centres and ninety-six employees. My job was to bring records into a new service arrangement without treating the sender's spreadsheet as proof of what had arrived. I worked with client representatives on sample checks, exception ownership and acceptance dates. The uncomfortable discussions usually concerned work neither side had priced. I learnt to bring those questions into the transition plan before they became arguments between people trying to finish a delivery late in the evening.

In April 2015 I took responsibility for regional operations. Three centre managers reported to me, and my remit included service performance, staffing and the relationship between retrieval promises and available trained capacity. I began accompanying the review of failed requests from the client's instruction through to the final handover. Sometimes our team had made a mistake. Sometimes the requested set had never been complete. Sometimes the instruction itself had changed. The operating response depended on that distinction, and a generic instruction to improve turnaround could make the underlying problem harder to see.

I became COO in April 2021. The company now has four centres and 285 employees. My team includes 228 operations colleagues, and I report to chief executive Nadia Zerwali. Finance, technology, compliance and commercial contracting have their own leaders. I recommend operating commitments and manage the approved budget, but I do not make lending decisions or determine the legal sufficiency of a mortgage record. I attend board discussions when invited to explain service capacity or a significant transition. I have never held a statutory directorship, and I describe that boundary plainly when considering a future board role.

Three recent pieces of work explain my approach better than a general claim about service quality. We reconciled a large intake before accepting its disputed entries, changed the event used to report a retrieval as complete, and divided a transfer into releases that our trained teams could absorb. None produced a cost-free improvement. The intake required paid checking time, the reporting change initially made performance look worse, and the staged transfer displaced other work. My responsibility was to explain those consequences before asking colleagues or clients to accept the decision.

I have also changed how I respond to an incomplete plan. Earlier in my career I sometimes became the person who collected every exception personally. That made me useful in the moment but left the operation dependent on my memory. I now ask the responsible manager to state the unresolved question and the evidence needed to close it, then review whether the proposed decision is proportionate. I want a future role where this habit can improve a larger service operation without making me the approval point for every folder, parcel or customer request. The measure is whether another capable person can make the next decision with a clear account of what happened before it.

Open to Board appointments · Executive opportunities

Languages / English · Hindi · Urdu