Microsoft-Cortana GM, Murari Sridharan joins BankBazaar.com as CTO

BankBazaar, India’s leading financial website, today announced the appointment of Murari Sridharan as Chief Technology Officer. Murari was previously the GM, Engineering at Microsoft Redmond.

“This is an exciting time for us at BankBazaar.com,” said Adhil Shetty, BankBazaar co-founder and CEO. “As the leading fintech company in India, everything we do is built around our technology. We have a fantastic team of people who have achieved path-breaking successes. At this point, we were looking for a leader who could give direction to our efforts better and help us go that extra mile. With his rich background of developing and implementing crucial high-performance initiatives successfully and on tight deadlines, Murari fits the bill perfectly.”

Based in Chennai, Murari will lead the technology initiatives pioneered by BankBazaar.com, such as the paperless application process, to the next level¬. Prior to joining BankBazaar.com, Murari was with Microsoft for the past 12 years. Most recently, he ran the engineering team that launched Cortana ¬– Microsoft’s digital assistant challenger to Apple's Siri.

Murari has a PhD from the Iowa State University, and has 12 patents at Microsoft. In the past, Murari has chaired two global internet standards group, which have, among other things, set the global standard for TCP’s congestion control mechanism that enables proper functioning of the internet.

Speaking on his decision to join BankBazaar.com, Murari said: “Work is a huge part of my life and I intend to have fun building products. The leadership & the team here is world class. This is my main reason to join BankBazaar as the people and problem space are awesome.The interesting science is how we infer user intent looking through tons of user activity and how to simplify task completion. This understanding of the user will not only increase conversion rates, but will allow us to run long-term campaigns for the user in a way that adds significant customer value. The most successful companies of the next decade are going to be folks that get user intent right and provide contextual and relevant information to simplify task completion. Bankbazaar is uniquely poised to take advantage of the shift from an app-centric world to a task-centric world and from a reactive pull based interaction model to a more proactive push based model. The possibilities are endless and the problem space is exceptionally interesting. There are a few companies in the world that will get this right, and BankBazaar.com promises to be one of them.”

BankBazaar.com hosts the widest range of financial products from over 50 of the biggest public and private sector banks, NBFCs, and insurance companies in India and gets an average of 5,000,000 visitors per month. The company is also hosting the largest ever month-long sale of financial products in March. The company generated a funding of USD 60M in its C-Series funding led by Amazon along with Fidelity Growth Partners and Mousse Partners and returning investors Sequoia Capital and Walden International in July this year, which spurred its growth further.