Avinash Raghavendra, president, IT-Axis Bank, has always been passionate about technology in banking. With a master’s in information technology from CISA, he is a recipient of various technology awards. As a CIO, Raghavendra’s role is aligned with strategic business outcomes. His key responsibilities include enriching customer experiences, empowering employees, ensuring top-notch project execution, collaborating with various business teams to meet revenue targets, and advancing the bank’s tech transformation programme while fostering innovation and risk control.
At Raghavendra’s behest, the bank has heavily invested in data analytics, to bring in best-in-class personalisation capability and is leveraging alternate data to scale up customer-centric franchise. With the help of data analytics, they have deployed 100-plus use cases in more than 10 business domains to help the bank contribute to its GPS (Growth, Profi tability, Sustainability) agenda.
Raghavendra has a dedicated team of enterprise architects to stay at the forefront of innovations in areas such as cloud-native and industry cloud platforms, Banking-As-A-Service, Enterprise Composability, Conversation Engines (Chatbots), Data Privacy, etc.
Raghavendra pioneered various initiatives, notably, Siddhi, an analytics-driven one-stop app for sales and managerial effectiveness, and Axis Mobile app providing customers with access to a comprehensive range of services. These digital channel enhancements have led to of 12 million Mobile Banking Monthly Active Users and more than 73 percent of current account customers being registered for internet/mobile banking. Under Raghavendra’s leadership, Axis Bank has embraced emerging technologies like generative AI, ML (Axis AHA), and blockchain to improve customer experiences, streamline operations, and drive efficiency.
For Raghavendra, success revolves around simplicity, integrity, customer centricity, perseverance, and persistence. His guiding principles have been keeping technology solutions straightforward and focusing on outcomes rather than complexity. In his own words, “For anybody new starting out, I would say one should appreciate all areas and stages of one’s career, and work with diverse teams to produce solutions that help achieve business and community objectives.”
