Shailendra Mruthyunjayappa: The 10 Most Inspiring Tech Leaders to Watch in 2022

As the financial services industry evolves with rapid digitization and innovation, it is bound to expand financial inclusion along with enhancing customer experience and convenience, leading to significant economic impact.

While the government and regulators encourage this disruption, they have to ensure orderly growth and expansion, enhance systemic stability, and improve trust and confidence in the financial ecosystem.

Fintellix is one of the leading regtech and suptech companies enabling supervisors and regulated entities cope with the dynamic regulatory environment. Fintellix solutions include data management, multi-country regulatory reporting, credit risk calculations, and supervisory technology for the banking and financial services industry. Head quartered in India, they have offices and serve customers in US, UK, Middle East, South Africa, South-East Asia and Australia.

Shailendra Mruthyunjayappa is the CEO of Fintellix. He is a career finance technologist with over 2 decades of industry experience gained in large enterprises and startups around the world. He is also a thought leader, board advisor and mentor to several startups.

Let us hear his views on the company, industry, leadership, and the future.

Company vision and strategies

Our purpose is to deliver technology to the financial industry that enhances financial stability and risk management, which is increasingly important in today's interconnected financial ecosystem.

We act as the regulatory compliance partner to financial institutions. Our data management, risk calculations and regulatory reporting solutions, together with our consulting services, helps financial institutions meet ongoing regulatory needs.

We have adopted a hybrid of enterprise and cloud offerings to serve financial institutions of all sizes and complexities, and to help them move up the maturity curve.

Our platform-based consultative approach helps us deliver solutions in a structured, standardized, and scalable manner. 

Innovation and growth

At Fintellix, we want to innovate and be the change agents, creating disruptive, sustainable, and scalable solutions which can help improve efficiency, reduce regulatory cost, and add value to the financial ecosystem.

We were one of the earliest regtech players to adopt big data and cloud technologies, which enabled us to process data at scale and offer our solutions on the cloud. Our low-code platform built on microservices architecture allows continuous integration and rapid solution delivery.  We continue to develop our API-driven architecture for data management and regulatory process automation. We are also embedding machine learning models that can help continuously improve the regulatory workflows and insights delivered. And we are experimenting with blockchain-based machine-readable regulatory configuration services.

We earmark substantial capital and leadership bandwidth for innovation projects in pursuit of our growth objectives.

Future of financial services industry

Over the next few years, I expect to see the emergence of "financial services in the flow" for consumers and businesses with seamless integration of financial services in life and business.

With embedded finance, we are already seeing financial products integrated into various aspects of life and business. This will evolve further into prediction of financial needs, personalization of financial products, and integration into users' daily activities, delivering seamless user experience while meeting all financial needs as they arise.  

Evolution of regulatory technology

Risk and regulatory technology came into being almost as an afterthought, following the rapid automation of the financial industry in the 90s. It further gained prominence after the economic crisis of 2008-09, when the industry faced a slew of regulatory changes aimed at improving financial stability. In the current state, financial institutions have embraced regulatory technology and strengthened their processes, but have implemented these as downstream solutions, having to endure complex integrations and data transformations. Faced with increasing pressure from regulators to implement certain risk management practices and provide high-quality data at a higher frequency and more granularity, financial institutions are struggling to cope with the backlog of regulatory changes.

Looking into the future, I believe regulatory process and technology will move upstream, and become integral to the design of enterprise architecture. It will become foundational, rather than staying on the fringes, to financial product development and process engineering. This will enable financial institutions to promote a risk-aware culture while handling regulatory requirements better and faster.

Regulatory technology is becoming even more important with the advent of new categories of risky assets such as crypto currencies, increasing interconnectedness from open banking/ open finance initiatives, proliferation of fintech players in the financial value chain, and the growing complexities of data privacy and consent.

Leadership journey and attributes

During my 2 decades of diverse and distinct experience as a technology professional, entrepreneur and business leader gained in various geographies, I've been privileged to work with some exceptional individuals, including several colleagues and clients, who've been a great source of inspiration and learning for me. Leadership is indeed a journey that involves self-awareness and continuous improvement, and I hope it never stops.

I wouldn't know how others perceive me as a leader. My endeavor is to be an agile and pragmatic leader, keeping the team motivated and aligned with the company goals and strategies, being collaborative or persuasive or experimental as the situation demands, but always working with empathy, humility, and integrity, and to get the job done!

People management

I firmly believe that people have infinite potential and are inherently good. With a little inspiration, motivation, clarity and push, people can achieve remarkable results. As people managers, we should drive the agenda of continuous learning and competency development, provide clarity of role and breakdown deliverables, regularly measure performance, and provide constructive feedback, and support the aspirations and career advancement of team members.

It is also important to blend intense work with fun and help everyone balance it with personal time. Happy, respected, and appreciated employees are the most committed and productive.

Workplace culture

Culture is the way people interact with each other, with clients and stakeholders, their expectations and practices, shared values, leaving people inside and outside the organization with a distinct emotion and experience.

To develop positive culture, it is very important for leaders and people managers to consciously and consistently practice, internalize, and normalize the behaviors, practices and values that we want to inculcate in the teams.

Advise to young professionals

Find purpose in work, pursue excellence, never let a learning opportunity go by, seek out mentorship, do not hesitate to take up a challenge, work with a positive attitude, and be authentic. You'll find the job to be more fulfilling and start feeling like the universe is conspiring for your success!