Integrating ecosystems with application programming interfaces (APIs) will fuel innovation and business growth in an evolving world. Throughout the last decade, APIs have silently played a significant role in revolutionizing legacy or old-school processes to make them simpler, more seamless, and more accessible. They have helped businesses streamline, share data, and improve overall efficiencies, thus increasing customer delight. Aayushi Saxena is raising the bar for the Fintech companies through AIML Data Analytics Solutions, founded in July 2019, which primarily caters to build Lending Products, Data Analytics and Risk Management needs of leading fin-techs across the globe. They are helping leading Fin-Techs by improving the customer journeys and efficiencies within the system while keeping quality and integrity in check. Aayushi did her bachelor’s from Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology and further did her MBA from IIM Calcutta and has several years of experience dealing with technology of cybersecurity space as well as fintech from where she developed her zeal to pursue her career in this respective fields. Below are the excerpts of an exclusive interview of Women Entrepreneur magazine with Aayushi.

Could you briefly describe your professional journey, and what motivates your business routines?

I have almost 10 years of product management & deep subject-matter expertise in building FinTech & Cyber Security B2B and B2C products. I started my professional journey with McAfee and Intel security and have spent decent amount of time in understanding various complex problems & process flows, bringing simplicity and solutions for them. Now, I am able to apply those learnings and experience in the fast paced running environment of the start-up. I love building products keeping technology, data and user experience in sync, telling how can we bring ease to user experience & enhance product functionality by customising user journeys and leveraging data & technology. I have managed and led cross-geo product & engineering teams for delivering scalable, reliable & secure Enterprise SaaS & Consumer focused Products to help organisations realise business outcomes by leveraging technology, process optimisation, and through platformization.

Tell us about your roles and responsibilities as Product Strategy and Management Director. What are the primary focus areas in your current position?

As Director of Products, my responsibility lies directly with the products that we are dealing with. This includes our products that we are building in-house as well as the products and improvements that we are doing on the client side. I manage multiple digital products across a wide range of customers from big brands to innovative start-ups. I am responsible for defining project scope, goals, and deliverables to ensure consistency with company strategy and commitments while assessing customer desires and requirements and generating a product that successfully meets those standards. With few clients, I have owned end to end products portfolio, including cross-selling credit products, underwriting, disbursement, management of loans and collection processes in both mobile as well as web apps. And with few, my role demands me to have a deep understanding of the business objectives of internal and external stakeholders to do the gap analysis and evangelise the right product vision and to have an achievable roadmap to bridge those gaps. In a nutshell, my role as a Director involves regularly integrating and collaborating with stakeholders including Design, Engineering, Marketing, Customer Service, Legal and Operations and help in setting their product vision, strategy, and execution.

Tell us about some of the most pressing challenges you encounter as a technology leader in your current role? How do you successfully mitigate these challenges?

As a leader, the main challenge is to keep your team's morale up. It's essential because, in a startup, it's not always smooth & shiny since everything is not pre-defined, so it could be tricky sometimes. It’s important for a start-up to build the credibility from scratch, as it's not always given. You have to get the team's morale up, motivate them, and get the best product out while giving them a clear vision around their growth. Lately, FinTech has become a very competitive space, but while we need to speed up things, we also need to be very careful about security, and compliance. Any small ignorance can lead to huge losses. Since my experience has taught me a lot from cybersecurity space as well, while working in fintech, I always try to apply those learnings and experience to build solutions which are not only consumer centric but also have strong secured backbone. I emphasis a lot on having good data & tracking processes as having these insights is very important to make correct product & technology decision.

“Every success and every positive result validates the effort that i have been putting in and this becomes a virtuous cycle for me that drives me to invest myself more in helping clients and dealing with these problems to bring best possible solution”

What are some of the most significant milestones you have achieved throughout your professional journey? What has been the driving force behind your success as a business leader?

I have always been a problem solver. I love to learn new things and bringing solutions to different problems brings another level of zeal in me to do further more. I am proud of different junctures of my professional life due to different reasons and successes. In my initial years in McAfee & Intel, I have always focussed on improvements and making things automated, faster, less error prone. I was always focussed on bringing scalability and efficiency within the system. From getting an eight year old legacy process to run from 12 hours to be completed within 6 hours, reducing the dependency from four operators to one and increasing efficiency from 67- 94 percent was one of the few initial milestones I always remember and cherish.

Though, I knew how to get things from 1 to 100, in later half of my professional journey, I managed to build things from scratch, teams from scratch. I feel great to remember those first six months in which I could release three products back to back in an unknown market like Mexico successfully even without knowing the native language. I was a significant milestone not just for me but for my whole team and post that, there was no going back. We continue to build more products and cater more clients to solve their business problems and deliver results that will help them grow and succeed. Every success and every positive result validates the effort that I have been putting in and this becomes a virtuous cycle for me that drives me to invest myself more in helping clients and dealing with these problems to bring best possible solution.

Aayushi Saxena,  Director- Product Strategy & Management, Aiml Analytics Solutions

Aayushi is a tech enthusiast who has helped several organizations realize business outcomes through her expertise in building products from 0 to 1 and taking them from 1 to 100. She has almost 10 years of product management and deep subject-matter expertise in building FinTech and Cyber Security B2B and B2C products.