Koushik Kadidal

Koushik Kadidal runs data at PayU with a mandate that doubles as a revenue line — his title pairs Chief Data Officer with Head of Insights Business, and the second half is literal. Since January 2024 he has led the push to put AI, ML and analytics underneath both sides of the house: the payments business and the credit business built around LazyPay, where he previously ran growth for two and a half years. The work spans GenAI in fintech support operations, real-time predictive fraud detection, and building the insights business that turns PayU's transaction data into product. He has become a fixture on the fintech data circuit — Global Fintech Fest 2025, keynote slots on winning with data — making the case that fintech's edge comes from deploying data against credit risk and customer experience simultaneously.

Kadidal's career is a study in analytics-native banking. He spent fourteen years at Capital One in the US, the company that built a bank on data science before the term existed, moving through cross-sell marketing, the firm's entry into digital marketing, late-stage collections strategy through the Great Recession (a five-supplier, 600-agent global network), commercial bank client strategy, and finally Business Director for Rewards & Loyalty, owning a $2 billion rewards liability. Seven years at Citi followed, heading offshore analytics for North America cards and later for Treasury & Trade, Commercial Bank and Global Operations out of Bengaluru — GCC-scale analytics leadership before GCC became the industry's favourite acronym. A Harvard Business School GMP and the inaugural presidency of the Harvard Club of Bengaluru round out the profile. The through-line is two decades of owning business outcomes — P&L, risk, growth — with data as the operating method, which is exactly the shape of CDO the listicle's criteria reward.