Two readers at every financial screen

The first financial screen I helped build sat on a teller's counter in a cooperative bank branch in Ahmedabad. In July 2003, after an electronics degree at Jhalorvat College of Engineering, I joined Sangrahi Softech as a junior programmer. The clerks who used our software knew most of their depositors by name. When a passbook entry looked wrong, the customer did not ask the system; she asked the clerk, who turned the monitor so they could both read it. I learnt then that a financial interface is often read by two people at once, and that the second reader is the one who has to trust it.

Patrakshar Infotech in Pune took me further into lending. From June 2006 I built and then specified loan modules for cooperative banks and credit societies. As a business analyst I sat with loan officers who kept a paper register alongside our system because the screen did not show what a member had been told at sanction. I stopped treating those registers as resistance. They were evidence of what the product had left out.

In August 2010 I moved to Shramvardhini Microfinance, a Pune lender making group loans to women in rural Maharashtra and northern Karnataka. Two months later, the crisis in Andhra Pradesh microfinance changed how the whole sector was judged, and collection conduct became a board question. My work was the field officer's tablet. We printed a receipt at the meeting, showed the instalment in Marathi or Kannada and recorded who had paid on behalf of whom. I also learnt the limits of a product: a well-designed receipt did not stop an officer from pressing a group too hard. That needed supervision, incentives and a complaints route the borrower could reach without her officer. I completed a weekend management diploma at Pragnyavan Institute of Management during those years.

Tijorikhata Payments in Mumbai, from January 2014, gave me product ownership of something people paid for every day. Distributors used our app to collect from kirana shops, and after 2017 those collections moved increasingly onto UPI. I managed the collection receipt, dispute and reconciliation flows. A salesperson could take a payment in seconds while the reconciliation that told the distributor it was genuine took two days. Speed at the point of payment was only useful if the slower parts kept up. It was also my first experience of managing people rather than only requirements.

I joined Kanchanpeth Finance in July 2018 as head of digital products, reporting to the chief operating officer. The company had more than three hundred branches and no app. We launched one in 2019 for interest payments through UPI and for booking a part-release of pledged gold. Online top-up followed in 2021, letting a borrower add to a loan against the same gold when its value had risen. The same year we launched a self-service journey for first-time borrowers. I championed that journey. In March 2023 I recommended stopping it, after it became clear that new borrowers were reading our online estimate as a promise the branch appraisal would not keep.

I became chief product officer in April 2022, when product was separated from technology. I report to the managing director and present to the board's IT strategy committee, but I am not a director. The work I care most about is often invisible in the app: the key fact statement explained aloud before signature, the warning that we never ask a borrower to return money through UPI, the auction notice delivered in her language by a person she knows. I share those decisions with credit, risk, compliance and collections colleagues who hold authority I do not.

I lead by asking product managers to bring a borrower's sentence, not a metric, to the start of a review. Our language editors have the same standing as designers, and branch managers test every material change before it reaches customers. Every product manager spends two days a quarter at a branch counter, and I do the same. When I disagree with the growth team, I try to put the cost of my position in money and days so that the managing director can weigh it fairly.

I would now like to bring that habit to a board outside lending. Many companies serve customers who need help to complete a transaction, and directors rarely see what that help involves. I hope to ask what the customer at the counter actually understood, while remembering how much I would have to learn about another business.

Open to Board appointments

Languages / Gujarati · Hindi · Marathi · English