The honest framing
This was not a product role, and I tell it straight because the value is exactly that. Three years in the Operation Solution Group - the engine room of Kotak's acquiring and payment-gateway business - is why my product work since has been designed for the failure modes operators actually live with.
The scope, in the order it grew
Merchant Payments Reporting first. Then settlements. Then reconciliation. Then end-to-end ownership of ecom acquiring chargebacks and representation - investigating and resolving settlement discrepancies across the merchant portfolio with zero customer-facing disruption. Each scope was the same lesson at a different layer: money movement is a chain of promises, and operations is where broken promises surface.
The wins with numbers attached
- Redesigned and automated the daily merchant payment reporting workflow: processing time from 9 hours to 1.5 (83% reduction), accuracy from 96% to 99.98%, twelve consecutive months of zero non-technical errors
- During COVID, ran consolidated operations for ecom, PoS, and credit-card disputes with a team of three for three months - SLAs and merchant settlements held throughout
- Moved into Operation Intelligence, the bridge between Product and Operations: built Excel and Power BI dashboards on fee management that surfaced pricing anomalies worth ~INR 19 lakh a year and fed senior leadership's digital-payments strategy
Why I left
An opportunity came up on the central side of India's bill-payments infrastructure. I wanted to see the same rails I had been operating - but from the regulator-adjacent side, at population scale. That is the next chapter.