How KC Overseas Education is experiencing exponential growth with pathbreaking innovations in tech
5 min read 24 Mar 2023, 09:30 AM ISTKC Overseas Education has leveraged state-of-the-art digital platforms to make student recruitment and financing a seamless and intuitive process for its students and channel partners located across the globe. It has also charted out its own growth story in the process
PremiumAs one of the market leaders in the overseas education space, KC Overseas Education has leveraged human-tech collaboration to help its partners and student fraternity alike and has achieved exponential growth in the process. Over the last 25 years, it has assisted more than 3 lakh students in their study-abroad journey. The firm has deployed cutting-edge technology in its digital platforms coursefinder.ai and elanloans.com to make student recruitment and financing a seamless and intuitive process for its students and channel partners located across the globe. This smart use of technology has helped the organization scale its international student recruitment by over 400% over the last 2 years. In an exclusive conversation, Head of Product at KC Overseas Education, Mr Prachet Agrawal spoke about the company’s growth story and the role played by technology.
Q. KC Overseas Education was set up in 1998 from a two-room office to help students fulfill their study abroad dreams. Today, you are one of the leading study abroad EdTech companies in India with more than 65 global offices. Can you tell us more about your growth story?
Mr Prachet Agrawal: KC Overseas Education was set up with the objective of providing world-class services to study abroad aspirants. With that goal in mind, we tied up with 700+ universities located across 29 study destinations including USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, among others, to offer students the right course, country, and university options to suit their profile and preferences. We also launched our EdTech platform coursefinder.ai and FinTech platform elanloans.com in 2018 which was an amalgamation of our two decades of industry expertise with cutting-edge technology. This human-tech collaboration helped us to redefine the service standards for all the stakeholders in the industry, leading to our rapid expansion across the length and breadth of South and Southeast Asia as well as Africa. Today we operate out of 11 countries namelyIndia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam.
Q. One of the key differentiators for KC Overseas Education is the ‘human touch’ that you offer. You have pioneered human-tech collaboration by investing heavily in quality human resources which power the technology in the right direction. Can you tell us more about this?
Mr Prachet Agrawal: Being an EdTech company in the International Student Recruitment Industry, our biggest asset over and above our tech capabilities is our human capital. We believe in recruiting the best talent for the role, be it for tech positions, counselling, or operations and we make no compromises here. Apart from imparting the right training to ensure success on the job we also inculcate our core values of excellence, commitment, honesty, and transparency in all our employees.
With the objective of providing seamless and end-to-end services to all our stakeholders, we have more than tripled our workforce – from 250 employees to 800+ employees over the last two years. We have received several awards and recognitions in the Study Abroad Industry which is a testament to the efforts and hard work of each team member at KC Overseas.
Q. Over the past 25 years, you have helped more than 3 lakh students aspiring to study overseas. What is the vision that keeps you going at KC Overseas Education?
Mr Prachet Agrawal:Our vision is to make a transformative impact on the Study Abroad Service sector through continual innovation in student services by connecting institutions, recruiters, and students across the globe.
Each one of us at KC Overseas is driven by the purpose and mission to bring overseas education within everyone’s reach. Seeing students succeed and knowing that we have been instrumental in changing their career and life path is our greatest achievement.
Q. One of the main levers that powered your growth story is technology. How is KC Overseas Education using technology as an enabler of change?
Mr Prachet Agrawal: An increased emphasis on technology has helped us enable more study abroad recruiters across the globe to guide and counsel their students with one of the most crucial life decisions – pursuing higher education in an overseas location. At KC Overseas Education, we have leveraged tech solutions and services to empower our partners who have assisted scores of students to reach their dream international universities. This, in turn, has helped our partners scale their businesses to new heights.
We have also used the power of technology to scale our operations across geographies like India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam. By spreading our wings across diverse geographies, we have helped our university partners gain more student diversity on their campuses. Our students, too, get a more enriching educational experience as they learn and interact with students from different cultures and backgrounds.
Our endeavor is to use technology to reach out to students at a grass-root level and offer students from Tier 2 and Tier 3 Indian cities access to global education. This education and international exposure will help them with better career prospects and brighter futures.
Q. By 2024, an estimated 20 lakh Indian students will be studying abroad, how are you going to leverage this massive opportunity at KC Overseas Education? What is the roadmap for the future?
Mr Prachet Agrawal: Technology has played a transformative role in helping KC Overseas deliver exceptional services to all stakeholders in the study abroad industry. Keeping this in mind, we plan to increase the investment in our tech platforms and recruit more tech talent that will help us in our growth plans. We also plan to add additional features and functionalities to our platform to further improve our services.
Furthermore, we plan to increase our student outreach by offering the KC Overseas Franchisee to qualified candidates in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities in India. We are keen to onboard more Study Abroad Recruiters who are hungry to expand their business and serve more students.
In addition, we also intend to scale our global operations to offer our services to more students and channel partners across different geographies. By 2024, we aim to recruit 50,000 students to international universities from South and Southeast Asia and Africa as well.
Disclaimer: This article has been produced on behalf of the brand by HT Brand Studio.
