Farhad VarzekarChief Technology Officer · Essays & perspective
Institutional clients
28
24 in India; four across Nepal and Sri Lanka
Engineers led
86
Five functional heads; March 2026
Engineering budget
₹36 Cr
Annual company allocation, not customer funds

I lead a financial-software engineering team that must explain its decisions to the institutions buying the product and to the people who inherit its records.

I am CTO of Orevathi Settlement Systems in Surat. We build reconciliation and exception-workflow software for banks, lenders and other financial institutions. We do not hold their customers' money or make their settlement decisions. Our 28 institutional clients use the product within their own responsibilities. I lead 86 engineers through five heads and administer a ₹36 crore annual engineering budget. At March 2026 the company had 310 employees, with FY 2026 revenue of ₹182 crore.

I entered engineering through document-imaging equipment in 1995. Working on the gap between a page and its digital representation taught me to distrust an apparently complete result whose source could not be examined. I joined Orevathi in 2001, moved through integration and product architecture, and became CTO in 2020. The work changed from connecting a file to a system to deciding which assumptions a product may safely carry across many institutions.

The decisions on this site concern ambiguous matching, a large client's effect on shared processing, an export that initially omitted usable evidence and a proposed customer-specific branch of the product. They show where engineering had to challenge a commercially attractive answer. Some choices reduced a headline performance measure or required expenditure that sales had not planned. I want the explanation to retain those consequences, because they are part of the job rather than footnotes to it.

The attractive match rate was insufficient

A proposed matching release was tested against 8,200 previously adjudicated record pairs. Fifty-four suggested pairings were plausible but wrong. Excluding ambiguous same-value groups reduced the simulated automatic-closure rate from 91% to 76%. We accepted the lower rate and retained human review rather than present a faster result as a better financial conclusion.

One busy client changed nine other mornings

A large import consumed 62% of a shared worker pool during the observed window. Nine other clients' median completion time rose from 21 to 56 minutes. We introduced bounded allocations and measured each client's completion experience, accepting that the largest job would finish later than under unrestricted use.

An export needed its supporting evidence

A customer exit rehearsal covered 36,000 exception cases. The data export contained 2,400 attachment references whose files were not included in a usable package. We funded ₹18 lakh of additional engineering work to produce an authorised export with the relevant evidence and access mapping; a row count alone had not established portability.

Current focus

I am strengthening the way product proposals describe their assumptions before a customer contract makes those assumptions difficult to change. The work includes matching evidence, capacity allocation and what an institution can independently understand from its own exported records.

Conversations I welcome

I would consider a first non-executive role in an enterprise-software or specialised service company with a substantive product-governance agenda. I can provisionally allow twenty-two days a year, subject to employer consent and conflict checks. I would help a board examine the relationship between engineering choices, commercial promises and continuing customer responsibility.

Beyond the page

The record behind the perspective.

Formation

  • Bachelor of Engineering in ElectronicsSavrenil Institute of Engineering · 1995
Since becoming CEO in 2019, I have relied on Farhad to explain the commitment behind a proposed delivery date. He will bring an alternative and its cost, including the possibility that the customer may decline it, instead of hiding the difficult part inside an engineering estimate.
Meher DalsaviCEO, Orevathi Settlement Systems; executive colleague since 2019
The full record ↗

Contact

I would consider a first non-executive role in an enterprise-software or specialised service company with a substantive product-governance agenda. I can provisionally allow twenty-two days a year, subject to employer consent and conflict checks. I would help a board examine the relationship between engineering choices, commercial promises and continuing customer responsibility.

  • Board appointments
Write to Farhad Contact page