Q&A: Loyalty Now Co-Chair and Group CEO, Anurag Vasisth
From his boyhood dreams of being an airline pilot to piloting centres of excellence for leading brands, Anurag Vasisth knows there’s more than one way to the top, provided you know how to pivot.
Q. You’ve worked with leading brands including American Express and Mastercard, and have been with Loyalty Now since 2022. Were you always interested in a career within the financial industry?
A. I've always lived an experimental life. I'd never dreamt that one day I'd be heading up a payment-linked rewards company, but I do remember the first time I saw my father use a credit card. I saw that flashy little payment instrument and I thought, “Wow, Dad uses this plastic or metal and it gets me gifts.” It was like magic.
Like many young children, I wanted to be a pilot. In my backyard at my family home overseas, I’d watch planes flying overhead, thinking what a life that is, what if I was part of that life? That dream stayed with me.
Q. Aviation is quite a departure from payments and the financial industry! Is your passion for commercial aviation how you came to work with British Airways early in your career?
A. I seriously thought about a career in commercial aviation though it was not mainstream at the time, especially in a market like India. There was only one major training school, and it was run by the state; in a country of over one billion people, there were only maybe 150 seats or 200 seats, and it was very competitive. If that wasn’t enough of a challenge, I was also diagnosed with a cyst on my brain that took me away from anything too adventurous for about three years.
That life event taught me one thing: life happens. It’s up to you how you deal with it, and how you deal with it is what makes you who you are; that defines your character. I decided that, if I can't fly, I want to be in aviation from another vantage point. I took a different path and, about a year after university, I was selected into the country's most prestigious airline management program, run by British Airways, where I was one of about seven individuals selected. This took me on a fast track into aviation. I started in international sales, followed by airport operations and, finally, special projects which involved launching brand new group airline carriers. We launched a major airline in India on behalf of British Airways and, at about 25 or 26, I became the youngest head of department, essentially leading commercial and reservations/space control. I was responsible for establishing the reservations, telesales, and airport departure control systems.
Q. That’s an incredible achievement and quite a pivot; can you share more about how your journey has brought you from commercial aviation into payments?
A. We were on the precipice of launching a full-service carrier in India when September 11 happened, which paused a lot of aviation-related activity. At that time, I was headhunted by GE Capital to manage their co-brand and private label cards centre of excellence, with onshore and offshore centres in Australia and India. I knew a thing or two about centres of excellence, client services, and payments from working on special projects for British Airways in that area, so it was a good fit.
Beyond GE, my collective experience in payments, travel, and aviation then led to more roles across India, Singapore, and Australia with eBookers and American Express. Ultimately, I spent over a decade across three countries—India, Singapore, and Australia—in national, Asia Pacific, and global roles, which was very rewarding.
Q. You’ve worked with a diverse range of brands while touching on different elements of the payments value chain; was that a conscious choice you made with each career choice, including your move to Loyalty Now?
A. I’ve been very blessed, I’m in gratitude for everything I have achieved in my life. I’ve never had a situation where I wished I had something else; I take pride in being a lifelong learner. I look at everything in my life as an opportunity to learn; even when I’ve been presented with two jobs of a similar nature, I’ll pick something where the learning and development would be good from an exposure point of view. My 10-year stint at American Express was a decade across different continents and countries, but also across two major verticals of payment: issuing and acquiring.
At the end of around 10 years, I had just won a prestigious Chairman’s Award at American Express and there was an opportunity for me to move to the UK. However, I’d just had a baby and wanted to spend more time in Australia, so I asked myself: what is the next move from a learning perspective? The logical next step would have been towards the network side of the payments business, and I was fortunate to have an opportunity to work for MasterCard—a leading global payments network—in Australia, making it an obvious choice.
After six or so rewarding years with Mastercard, I realised that not many people have those combined skillsets across the payments value chain. It was yet another question: what next? It was again very clear that, from a “before” and “during” the transaction perspective in terms of the payments value chain, I've been there, done that. The next step is the “after”, which is loyalty.
Q. Did this lead you directly to Loyalty Now?
A. Not immediately. Finishing up at Mastercard gave me time to reflect on my life journey to that point and calibrate my vision for the future. A prior life event of my father passing unexpectedly in his mid-fifties had a profound impact on me; it’s part of why I wanted to spend more time in Australia with my family, but also what inspired me to draw a metaphorical line in the sand to (hopefully) retire at age 50. This was around the same time I would say my self-actualisation journey started as well. The vision of retirement for me has never been about not working; it’s about working on your own terms, creating value by leveraging your lifelong skills, when work becomes your passion and hobby. You stop working actively and start working passively, you’re not forced to work, and the results come in passively. I established my consulting firm—Allied Business Partners—in 2018. Through that, I was engaged by Loyalty Now as an advisor to the board, which uncovered an opportunity to create value through my lifelong skills, and I eventually stepped into the role of Co-Chair and Group CEO where I’ve been for over two years.
Q. Loyalty Now is a different environment from where you’ve come from. You’ve moved from very well-known, established brands to an organisation that is at an earlier point in its journey. How has your experience transferred into this environment?
A. Setting up my own consulting firm was the first step in the direction of Loyalty Now. I've been around the world and I needed to bring all those learnings to fruition in the form of creating value for that segment of companies who do not have the privilege of being one of the top 100 corporations in the world: the startup community.
When I started with Loyalty Now, I found that it had put together a good piece of technology that could be made better through layers of innovation and taken to market through active commercialisation, and that was the skillset I had. Loyalty Now let me put together some of the fundamentals. How many of us get to implement fundamental vision, mission, objectives and strategies (business school 101)? Usually, when you walk into a Fortune 500 company, it already has a vision, a mission, and well-defined objectives. You simply execute on strategy, no matter how senior you are; even at a country level, you’re basically executing a global strategy.
I got that unique opportunity with Loyalty Now, not only creating a brand-new vision and mission, but also translating those into objectives and strategies. Our success is evident through what we have achieved in the last two-and-a-half years. We have built a well-known brand, robust enterprise-grade technology with ISO 27001-2022 and PCI DSS Level 1-V4 certification. Earlier this year, we were awarded the most innovative company in the loyalty and reward space.
Now, we’ve taken our technology to the market with a view to solve the market’s specific problems, and we’ve ended up cracking five major industries, including aviation, telecommunications, insurance, fintech, and industry unions. We’re strategic partners with the Australian Loyalty Association, and we have been participating in some of the major forums across Asia Pacific. We’re already top of mind in terms of brand recall, and that can often take over a decade, sometimes a couple of decades, to achieve. We are in a very privileged, blessed position.
Q. That really is such an incredible journey, both for you and for Loyalty Now. I want to touch on something interesting that you mentioned earlier about being a lifelong learner, and that’s one of our values at The Recognition Group. Could you unpack that a bit more?
A. I’m a spiritual practitioner. I always believe that, when you put in 100 per cent with your heart and soul, along with your talent, skill, and ability to collaborate with various stakeholders, then there are powers above us who always make things possible. So, I do believe that a lot of smart work, dedication, and skills are essential to deal with the “controllables”, but I also believe that passion pursued with utmost integrity attracts the blessings of the powers from the metaphysical universe, which address the “uncontrollables”.
Part of my work ethic and dedication comes from being a lifelong learner. At Loyalty Now, we’ve mapped a journey of creating value where you bring all your learnings from your academic background, from your professional background, and from the time you've spent learning from your life experiences. You need that experiential learning to create value for a segment that typically otherwise does not get access to it. Lifelong learning has given me skills and attributes to see a good opportunity, to create value in a system where there’s a clear gap, to fill that gap.