I have known Parvez Iftikhar over 30 years and have followed the arc of this career and performance as an engineer, manager and finally, as the CEO of USF.
His pleasant personality, focus, clarity as well as his high EQ has led him to be successful and be liked at the same time! In Siemens, he brought many new technologies and systems to market and ensured a leading position for his company with an YoY growth which surpassed his colleagues and competition.
However, it was his time as the founding CEO of USF (Universal Service Fund) which was his crowning achievement. I was a part of the team which wrote the Telecom deregulation policy. This contained the ‘routine’ segment for USF.
Since the market was being privatized and opened up, it was felt that unless there was focus and emphasis on developing the ‘low yield’ (Rural and under served) areas, there would be huge disparity.
When Parvez was selected as the CEO, even though I had considerable respect for his professional experience and ability, I was not sure that he could tackle this enormous challenge. USF had not been successful anywhere in the World and Pakistan was a bigger challenge on all dimensions.
An exploding telecom sector (going from 3% penetration to over 55% in a very short time), operators not willing to be distracted from their quest for exploiting the high revenue areas, difficult financial and audit conditions, a very top heavy Board of Directors (Prime Minister being the Chairman) and everything stacked up for ensuring failure.
Parvez changed the whole paradigm of how a Public Obligation should be met. His training as a savvy marketeer, humility, honesty, great ambition to meet and exceed challenges and his comfort in dealing with people at all levels as well as very savvy BoDs, changed the landscape. Selected a very professional team and then led them with enthusiasm and verve.
He went to Operators to sell them the idea that he was giving them ‘free money’ to evolve a market that they were going to get to anyway. Having been a supplier of systems and networks, he could convince everyone to participate.
His unconventional approach led USF to become phenomenally successful and people around the world of Telecom (Regulators, Governments and Operators alike) were struck with the success of something that had never gone anywhere and had been the uncomfortable secret of the Telecom Regulatory world for decades, as being a failure.
While the ecosystem may have been poised to help, it was Parvez’ approach and dynamism that ensured not only a wildly successful rural development of voice telephony, he pursued and opened up the concept of ‘under served’ areas for Broadband in the rural and urban areas alike.
All this, while handling billions of Rupees of in a transparent manner and making sure that a strict financial regimen was followed in all transactions: all audits have declared a squeaky clean result over the years.
Incomparable performance!
