Anand Bhatia

Anand Bhatia runs data at HDB Financial Services, the HDFC Bank-promoted NBFC that went public in 2025, with a brief wider than most CDO desks: analytics, data protection, AI-driven DIY customer journeys, digital assets, cross-sell, and the brand itself. The width fits the business. HDB lends deep into Bharat — tier 2/3 borrowers, thin-file and first-time credit, phygital distribution — where data models price customers the bureaus barely see. His current build pairs that lending engine with cloud and GenAI muscle: the invite-only HDB–AWS Ideathon put shortlisted teams on live enterprise use cases with a stated bar of deployment-ready, measurable solutions rather than demo theatre. With DPDP obligations folded into the same desk, he carries both sides of the modern data mandate — extract value from customer data, and answer for its protection.

Bhatia is the consumer-behaviourist on this list, and his route to the CDO chair explains the operating style. He co-founded Ormax Money in 2010 and spent eight years building one of India's first behavioural research practices dedicated to BFSI, advising banks, insurers and lenders on how Indian customers actually decide. Then six years at Fino Payments Bank — first heading marketing, analytics and BI, then five years as CMO building a phygital bank for underbanked India. He still runs his own street ethnography, publishing "streetvox" field notes on gig workers and cab owners reasoning through EMIs and asset ownership. Where his peers learned data in capital markets or regulatory architecture, Bhatia learned it watching borrowers think. For an NBFC whose growth depends on reading exactly that customer, the fit is unusually tight. IIM Lucknow and a civil engineering degree from SPCE round out the profile.