About

One of the world’s leading facility services companies with global revenues in 2017 amounting to Kr.79.9bn, Danish firm ISS Facility Services employs over 55,000 employees in India alone. Being dedicated to delivering high quality support services and doing business the right way by being actively involved in corporate responsibility and sustainability initiatives, Ajay D’Cruz has a highly important role to play internally as ISS’s head of legal and secretarial since 2017. Fortunately he has a rich and diverse experience having held prominent positions for 16 years in the field of legal, compliance, regulatory and secretarial functions encompassing corporate laws, joint ventures, IT laws, litigation and contract management as well as board, shareholder and governance matters. ‘I also possess strong IT skills in web development and when combined with my past experience of driving technology adoption in the legal domain, [it] has been an essential recipe to “getting IT right” the first time’, he says. Since joining ISS, D’Cruz has been commended for developing its legal function by formulating and enforcing several legally binding policies and frameworks and introducing the legal business partner structure in ISS India for different business verticals. D’Cruz has also facilitated employee job rotation from time to time within the department to help employees to broaden their experience in addition to giving temporary projects to legal team members in other cross-functional departments within the company – both of which has benefitted the company in numerous ways. D’Cruz says that working closely with the business and its transactional and operational teams has widened his ‘horizon of business understanding and the mechanics around it’, adding, ‘my involvement in digital transformation projects has made me an integral part of the business and legal software development life cycle’. He also highlights his experience of working with ISS’s c-suite and multinationals as key highlights of his in-house career. Prior to joining ISS India, D’Cruz enjoyed working at notable companies such as Jones Lang LaSalle Property Consultants India (JLL India) and GKB Carl- Zeiss India in prominent legal and secretarial positions, receiving the prestigious Magna Carta award during his seven-and-a-half year tenure at JLL India. His philosophy, he says, ‘is driven and I ensure I continuously learn something new and I believe that sharing of knowledge is important so I have addressed audiences from different backgrounds at various forums as a speaker or key note speaker on topics like the Companies Act and other legal topics’.