GTECH Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jaymin B. Patel told his story to a national audience in a recent edition of The New York Times.
Patel, 42, offered a first-person account of his life and career path in an installment of The Boss, a regular column in the paper’s business section that features stories from executives in a variety of industries.
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Patel grew up just outside of London but was born in Nairobi, Kenya, where his family was part of the Indian migration there. “My grandfather came first, to work on the East African railroad,” he said. “My father worked as a grocery store clerk and then as a bank cashier until he and my mother moved to England in 1970, hoping for a better life and better education for my sister and me.”
Patel received his honors degree in accountancy from Birmingham Polytechnic (now Birmingham City University) and began his career as an accountant. It was while working at PriceWaterhouseCoopers in London that Patel was first introduced to GTECH after being given a new project.
“In 1992, I was assigned to work with a consortium of five companies, including Cadbury Schweppes and GTECH,” Patel said. “Called the Camelot project, the consortium was organized to bid on operating Britain’s newly approved national lottery. That assignment was a heady experience for a man in his early 20s.”
After the Camelot project, Patel was hired to serve as the financial controller of GTECH’s British subsidiary. He moved to the United States in the spring of 1997, along with his wife, Kinnari.
By 1999, Patel was appointed acting chief financial officer at GTECH, and in 2007 he was named president and chief operating officer.
Patel was named CEO a few months later following the retirement of W. Bruce Turner and the company’s acquisition by Italian gaming giant Lottomatica S.p.A.
“I had always hoped and planned that one day I would be able to run the company,” Patel told Providence Business News in 2008. “I’d been trained for it. I worked very closely with Bruce Turner. We worked together on all of the growth strategies in the company, and it was always my goal to eventually take over when Bruce wanted to retire.”
