Bengaluru: Avail Finance, one of India’s leading neo-banks that provide products and offerings for the blue-collared workforce of India, announced the appointment of Alexander John as its Chief Business Officer recently.
An industry veteran with over 24 years of experience, Alex has held a number of senior leadership roles spanning business, risk, strategy across the banking and ITeS spectrum. In his previous role, he was the Chief Risk Officer for Avanti Financial Services, a fintech founded by Ratan Tata and Nandan Nilekani. Prior to Avanti, he was the Business Head, for the Micro and Small business lending segment at Jana Bank.
“I am pleased to welcome Alex to the Avail Finance family. His experience across diverse roles will be a huge positive as Avail gets ready to scale up significantly” said Ankush Aggarwal, Founder, and CEO, Avail Finance.
Expressing his delight over joining Avail Finance, Alexander John said, “I am thrilled to start my new role at Avail Finance alongside some really talented professionals. Neo banks are the future of the finance industry and with the nature of the audience that Avail Finance services, there is the massive potential of growth for the brand. Avail has become a trusted name in a very short time and I look forward to growing the business volumes and increasing profitability.”
Alexander comes with immense experience managing large-scale operations and rollouts spanning multiple geographics, building overall stages of credit cycles, launching new businesses as well as rollback of unsustainable product lines, scorecard development, maintenance as well as setting up and building businesses end to end. His vast experience will help Avail Finance build up business volumes and increase profitability while balancing risk and reward.
Apart from Alexander’s appointment, in the last quarter, Avail Finance has brought on board several industry veterans such as Anujeet Kudva, Chief Risk Officer (CRO) who is responsible for risk & collections at Avail, “Alumnus of North Western University, 20 years of diversified experience in risk management, credit underwriting, collections, developing lending models, Gaurav Sehgal, Chief Financial Officer who is leading the Finance, legal and secretarial function involving stakeholder management with investors along with other responsibilities, Over 16 years of experience in Financing sector with the companies like Deloitte, OakNorth Bank established accounting system and internal control, processes and workflows, lead the operations and participate in strategic business decision making, and Som Dutta, Chief Data Scientist, who heads data science and analytics at Avail. He is graduated with a Ph.D in theoretical physics from the University of Rochester in New York and has spent the last decade focused on applying ML and Deep Learning to search, information retrieval, NLP, and Computer Vision problems across companies”.
The above key hires form Avail’s core leadership team and will help it grow at scale — all towards realizing the company’s mission of creating a holistic financial platform with customized products for different segments of Indian consumers.
Avail is aggressively building up its leadership team with a good mix across MNCs and fast-paced startups as it embarks on its 10x journey. The idea is to have a strong talent pool of problem solvers, who bring to the table a strategic mindset built over the multiple zero to one and one to 100 journeys in their career. The company plans to grow its tech, product, and business talent pools by 2x in the next 6-8 months.
