Head of Technology, Data and Infrastructure, Investment Banking
Radhika Venkatraman, who is head of technology, data and infrastructure for Credit Suisse’s investment bank, has stepped up her efforts to make her arm of the Zurich-based bank more innovative.
Venkatraman, who has been with the bank for four years and before that was Verizon’s chief information officer, recently upgraded the technology that bond traders use, developing a bond recommendation engine that she refers to as a “Netflix for bonds.” It uses machine learning to identify the characteristics of bonds a client typically trades, then proactively identifies other bonds in Credit Suisse’s inventory that the client might be interested in.
With Venkatraman’s guidance, Credit Suisse’s investment bank has also joined the financial industry’s move toward cloud computing, with her teams currently migrating around 40 applications to a public cloud.
One thing she has done to encourage innovation in her group is run her own version of “Shark Tank,” the popular television show in which entrepreneurs pitch their product ideas to brutally honest financiers. She set up an innovation pipeline through which employees submitted more than 400 ideas over the course of 18 months. Those were reviewed and narrowed down to 16 ideas. During a “Shark Tank”-like event this summer, employees presented a handful of their ideas to compete for funding. Some are heading into production.
Resilience is a career theme for Venkatraman.
“Everyone makes mistakes,” she said. “But the issue isn't necessarily making a professional blunder, it's how you recover from it and what you take away from it.”
Her advice to those faced with setbacks is, “Don’t dwell on the downside — focus on the upside. What can you take away to advance change and improve results?”
