Yashaswini Nalla

After working in the hospitality industry, I made a deliberate move to the financial sector because I recognized the transformative potential of AI in banking. What drew me to this space was the challenge - implementing AI in financial services requires ultimate care and proper guardrails because of the sensitive data involved. I wanted to be in a place that was truly challenging. As a platform architect, I lead a team of 22 people and architect solutions that are really important for the bank, including loan approval processes, customer satisfaction surveys, and customer experience improvements. What makes this work meaningful to me is that unlike hospitality where someone might stay at a hotel once a month, people interact with their bank every single day - they open their bank accounts, use credit cards and debit cards. Banking is truly embedded into people's lives, and I wanted to work in a space that's really close to ourselves. My day-to-day involves automating existing workflows, reducing toil around repetitive tasks, adding agentic flows to help humans in the loop diagnose and triage issues, and managing our entire digital platform including all mobile and web applications. I also collaborate extensively with vendors in the market to analyze their tools and determine buy versus build decisions, ensuring any solutions we adopt fit the unique requirements of the financial industry. Moving from an individual contributor to leading a team and architecting solutions in just two years has been one of my proudest accomplishments, especially as a woman in technology leadership.