Hitachi’s Ramesh Srinivasan to join BankBazaar as CFO

NEW DELHI: Online financial marketplace BankBazaar said that Ramesh Srinivasan will be joining the company as its new CFO.

Ramesh comes with 22 years of experience in the Banking & Financial Services Industry (BFSI) segment and was earlier the Financial Advisor at Hitachi Payment Services.

Prior to his current role, Ramesh was Chief Financial Officer and was also in charge of business planning and strategy for BNA & CRM at Hitachi Payment Services.

A Chartered Accountant and Cost Accountant by education, Ramesh has been a part of organizations such as AT&T‚ NCR, and Optimus. Ramesh would be based in Chennai and would be responsible for leading the company towards an IPO release.

Speaking on the appointment, Adhil Shetty, CEO, BankBazaar, said: “This is a very exciting time for BankBazaar. Our technology and paperless platform have made BankBazaar the flag-bearer in helping customers access the right financial products online in the safest and simplest manner. Now we are looking to consolidate our successes and plan ahead with an eye on releasing our IPO in 2020-22. We are confident that Ramesh's expertise in developing financial processes will take us further on our path.”

At a time when most sectors and businesses are thinking of downsizing and cost-cutting, BankBazaar continues on an expansion mode. Previously, BankBazaar had announced that it would be recruiting approx. 400 new employees. As of August 2017, the company has welcomed more than 130 new employees, and is in the process of recruiting more.

The company anticipates this expansion to drive its future vision and roadmap after a strong growth in 2016-17.

Shetty explains: “We are working on building bigger and more diverse team that can take on the challenges thrown up by next stage of the business cycle. This new team will drive the next phase of growth and profitability for BankBazaar. The expectations are high and so is our enthusiasm.”

In the last financial year, BankBazaar has seen a remarkable growth. The company has made great strides in developing a paperless platform for a range of products, implementing the world’s first multi-brand platform for unsecured credit products such as personal loans and credit cards, along with paperless investment products. The number of unique visitors per month grew from 9M in March 2016 to 17M in March 2017.

This is despite a 50% reduction in cost per customer acquisition. The company also announced positive unit economics on every transaction in the last financial year and is on track to achieve EBITDA profitability from December 2017. The year 2016 also saw BankBazaar’s expansion into the international market beginning with Singapore followed by Malaysia in 2017.

BankBazaar is funded by global investors such as Walden International, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Growth Partners, Mousse Partners and Amazon, and has received investment of USD 80M till date.