Deepen Ram, CEO and Managing Partner, Greenleaf Global

Biz@India

March-April 2014

Sharing global experience with Indian families

Deepen Ram, CEO and Managing Partner, Greenleaf Global

With experience of over 25 years in investments, management and education, Deepen Ram has been managing health, training, and development programmes of Greenleaf Global since 2011 in Switzerland. The group is a family trust, originated in 1970. Now with an endeavour to reconnect to Indian roots, Ram wants to share his international experience with Indian families and organisations through a value-driven approach to health, learning, and development based on sound and effective principles and practices.
 
• Tell us something about your organisation. When was it initiated and how has it evolved over the years?
 
The foundations of the work we are doing today in integrated health and development originated in 1970s by my father in India. We then moved to Switzerland so he could establish his vision of integrated healthcare with various international and private organisations worldwide. After doing my studies, I started working in banking and finance and in 2010, after the passing of my mother, I moved back into an active role in running and growing the health and development programmes worldwide. Today, our group is running and developing our programmes and activities in North America, Europe and China. We are looking to becoming much more active in India, Asia and South America over the next 3-5 years and we expect the number of our partners and collaborators to grow rapidly.

• What kind of services do you provide and how can these benefit the UHNWIs?

We primarily provide specialised programmes in health and learning to organisations and private clients. For the UHNWI clients, we mainly provide personal training, family resolution and corporate governance services. We also have a specific active trading service that we offer to a selected clientele.

• Are your existing client’s single family units or multiple families?

For the moment, they are mainly single family offices.

• What is your firm’s investment philosophy?

Our philosophy is to create recurring revenue to provide working capital, reserves and long-term growth for our programmes worldwide.

• How are your teams structured to deliver services to the clients? Do you have different services for different UHNWIs – inheritors, selfmade and professionals?

We have separate investment/ governance and health / learning services.

• What are the top three characteristics that distinguish your firm the most from your competitors?

In health and learning, we have a unique methodology and protocol that is extremely effective in treating certain disorders and general conditions that most mainstream treatments and institutions are ineffective in addressing. Our personal and group training programmes are extremely effective in boosting performance and achieving effective governance and sustainability.

For our active investments, we invest our money alongside the client and provide a certain level of guarantee to their investment capital and provide institutional market conditions in a private service framework which dramatically lowers the client’s costs and increases the service value.

• Do you provide any client education programmes? Please mention.

Yes. We do an individual or group evaluation and tailor-make a training programme incorporating our dynamics model to first resolve various types of personal, performance, and organisational barriers and then provide either intensive or progressive training to allow the client to become self-sufficient.

• What is your approach towards risk management?

Quarterly review on risk/reward/ cost basis scaled according to the weighting of the activity in our portfolio.

• Is there any impact of economic slowdown on the demand? Are clients more cost conscious or quality conscious in the times of slowdown?

In times of economic slowdown, we do see some budgets cuts by certain organisations as they reallocate funds to support their core activities; however the performance oriented organisations usually are calling on our support more actively in times of slowdown as they understand that it is essential in sustaining performance.

The demand from private individuals for our services is relatively constant throughout the economic cycle though we do see volatility in certain sectors such banking and finance depending BIZ@INDIA March-April 2014 43 on the economic and regulatory environment.

The demand from private individuals for our services is relatively constant throughout the economic cycle though we do see volatility in certain sectors such banking and finance depending on the economic and regulatory environment

• What kind of potential do you see for the Indian family office business? What is your outlook? What are the current trends and opportunities?

One of the reasons I have come back to India is to reconnect with my Indian roots and share my international experience with Indian families and organisations. This age in which we see the younger generation coming up into positions of responsibility in the world continues to provide incredible opportunities and challenges as India develops in the 21st century. My wish is to offer my contribution to India through a value-driven approach to health, learning, and development based on sound and effective principles and practices.