Work Experience

Early Years — Learning Banking Operations | 2018–2020

I began my banking career in June 2018 as a Management Trainee with Capital First Ltd., shortly after completing my MBA. I joined the central Retail Assets Operations team within Loan Servicing, where a small team of around five to six people managed customer servicing activities. My initial responsibility was processing customer refunds, with monthly volumes then running in the hundreds.

After completing my traineeship, I continued with the team as a Deputy Operations Manager.

A business in transition

December 2018 marked an important change. Capital First merged with IDFC Bank to form IDFC FIRST Bank, bringing together the operations of the two organizations.

For our team, integration significantly changed the scale and complexity of the operating environment. We were now servicing requirements across the combined branch and asset network, resulting in substantially higher transaction volumes and a broader processing scope.

It was my first experience of working through a major organisational transformation and seeing how changes at an enterprise level translate into operational challenges at process level.

From processing to process improvement

As the newly formed bank pursued its ambition of becoming a digitally focused, customer-centric bank, operational processes increasingly came under the lens of turnaround time, productivity, scalability and automation.

This changed the way I began to think about Operations.

The objective was no longer simply to process a request correctly. We increasingly had to ask:

• Can the process be simplified?

• Where are the bottlenecks?

• Can information move more efficiently between teams?

• Can manual activities be automated?

• Can turnaround time improve without compromising accuracy or controls?

• Will the process remain effective as volumes increase?

These questions would become increasingly important as my responsibilities grew over the following years.

Looking back, this period gave me my foundation in banking operations, process governance and continuous improvement—areas that would later shape my interest in controls and Operational Risk.

Operating Through Disruption | 2020–2021

The COVID-19 pandemic created an operating challenge unlike anything we had previously experienced.

Before the pandemic, our processes were almost entirely office-based. When the nationwide lockdown was announced in March 2020, we therefore had to find ways to continue servicing customers despite suddenly losing access to our usual workplace and infrastructure.

Maintaining operations during lockdown

During the initial phase of the lockdown, remote connectivity was made available to managers. This allowed us to access systems remotely and continue processing essential customer requests ourselves.

The transition was far from seamless. Connectivity and system-access challenges had to be worked through as they emerged, while customer requests still needed to be processed. Although volumes had reduced during the lockdown, maintaining continuity of service remained important.

This period required us to adapt quickly, troubleshoot problems as they occurred and find workable solutions within an environment we had never previously operated in.

By mid-May, once critical employees were permitted to return to office during the lockdown, I returned to the office while broader restrictions were still in place.

The next challenge was bringing the wider team back online.

We gradually enabled team members to work remotely by arranging the necessary infrastructure remotely. This allowed the majority of the team to resume operations remotely and helped establish a more sustainable operating model while restrictions continued.

Understandably, many of the process-improvement initiatives we had been pursuing before the pandemic moved temporarily to the background. Operational continuity had become the immediate priority.

Adapting the process after the disruption

As operating conditions began to stabilise, another significant change was taking place in how customer requests entered our process.

The transition, however, could not happen overnight.

Existing requests first needed to be reconciled before the workflow could transition to the new source. We worked through the pending population before gaining direct access to retrieve reports and gradually re-organising the downstream process around this new source.

This meant adapting not simply one activity, but the wider workflow—how requests were received, identified, tracked and subsequently processed.

What this period taught me

Looking back, 2020–2021 changed my understanding of Operations considerably.

The pandemic demonstrated that a process cannot be considered effective solely because it performs well under normal conditions. It must also be capable of adapting when people, systems, infrastructure or established ways of working suddenly become unavailable.

At the time, I viewed much of this simply as solving the operational problems in front of us. With the benefit of my subsequent risk-management learning, I can recognise many of the underlying principles more clearly: business continuity, operational resilience, dependency management, adaptability and controlled change.

The experience also reinforced something that would become increasingly important in the next phase of my career: processes need to evolve with the environment around them rather than remain fixed around the way work has historically been performed.

Scaling, Automation & Process Governance | 2021–2023

I was promoted to Operations Manager in April 2021, taking greater ownership of the process I had worked on since joining the organization.

By this stage, the bank's digital transformation was gathering pace and a thorough review of our process was underway, with automation as a central objective. The ambition was significant: rather than automating individual activities, we were exploring how much of the process could operate end-to-end with minimal manual intervention.

This meant looking closely at every process step, control and checkpoint and asking a different question:

Can this be automated while preserving the controls and outcomes the process requires?

Building an end-to-end automated process

The solution automated the end-to-end processing journey, with straightforward cases processed through straight-through automation and defined exceptions routed to Operations for manual review. This enabled approximately 70% of overall volumes to be processed through automation, with additional scenarios incorporated through subsequent enhancements.

My involvement covered the automation lifecycle from the Operations side. I prepared the Business Requirements Document (BRD) for submission to the project team, participated in User Acceptance Testing (UAT) to validate whether the solution behaved as expected, supported implementation and monitored its performance after go-live.

I made a conscious effort to understand how the automation worked beyond the user interface—including its processing logic and dependencies—so that when exceptions or production issues arose, I could contribute meaningfully to identifying the problem and working with the relevant teams towards resolution.

Expanding the scope

Around 2022, I was given responsibility for another related process, which was subsequently taken up for automation.

These automations eventually enabled up to 90% of volumes to be processed automatically.

I was involved in the automation journey across all three processing components, as well as improvements to allied activities.

The experience changed the nature of my role considerably. I was no longer simply managing how work was processed; I was increasingly involved in how the process itself should be designed, controlled, automated and monitored.

My contribution during this period was recognized with the Power of One Award for performance during H1 2022.

Scaling the operation

Automation did not mean that the Operations function stopped growing.

As the bank expanded and introduced additional products, servicing volumes continued to increase. By 2023, my team had grown to approximately 15 people managing the three processing streams, alongside the automated workflows.

This created a different management challenge.

The operating model now had to accommodate both automated and manual processing, with the team increasingly focused on exceptions and scenarios that could not be completed through straight-through processing.

It made monitoring particularly important. Automation needed to be observed not simply for whether it was running, but whether requests were being processed correctly, exceptions were being identified and manual interventions were being completed within expected timelines.

Beyond the process

Because the processes under my responsibility directly affected customer servicing, my involvement also increasingly extended beyond the boundaries of my own team.

I participated in task forces and improvement initiatives focused on areas such as reducing customer complaints, improving complaint resolution and identifying recurring operational issues affecting customer experience.

This required working across teams and looking beyond an individual transaction to understand where process design, communication, system behaviour or operational execution was contributing to a wider customer problem.

What this period taught me

This period fundamentally changed how I viewed process management.

Automation taught me that efficiency and control cannot be considered separately. Removing manual intervention can reduce certain risks and significantly improve capacity and turnaround time, but it also changes the nature of the risks that remain.

When straightforward transactions are processed automatically, Operations increasingly deals with exceptions, failed checkpoints and unusual scenarios—precisely the cases where judgement and effective controls become particularly important.

It also taught me that successful change does not end at implementation.

Requirements → Testing → Implementation → Monitoring → Exceptions → Enhancements

Each stage matters.

By the end of this period, my role had evolved considerably from the processing responsibilities with which I had started my career. I was now managing people, processes, automated workflows, exceptions and change initiatives within an increasingly large and digitally driven banking operation.

Senior Operations Leadership | 2023–2024

I was promoted to Senior Operations Manager in April 2023, marking my second promotion within the organisation.

By this stage, my responsibilities increasingly extended beyond the day-to-day management of my own processes. I became involved in projects and governance activities spanning different teams across the Loan Servicing function, while continuing to oversee the processes and team under my responsibility.

Looking beyond individual process boundaries

One principle I had increasingly adopted was to understand a process end-to-end rather than only the activities performed by my own team.

This meant understanding where our inputs originated, what happened upstream before a request reached us, where our outputs went next and how failures at different points could ultimately affect the customer or other teams.

That broader understanding led to my involvement in initiatives outside the immediate boundaries of my process.

These included projects to improve the customer facing processes, and further enhancements to existing automated workflows.

Working across these initiatives reinforced the importance of looking at a process not as an isolated set of activities, but as part of a wider chain of systems, teams, information flows and dependencies.

Reconciliation & Exception Governance

I was also given responsibility for reviewing reconciliation exceptions across the wider Loan Servicing unit.

The immediate objective was to understand and reduce a substantial population of ageing exceptions.

Rather than treating reconciliation simply as an exercise in clearing outstanding entries, the work required understanding why an exception existed, tracing it through the relevant process and working with the appropriate stakeholders towards resolution.

Over this period, I helped resolve close to 500 high-ageing reconciliation exceptions.

The experience reinforced something I had increasingly observed throughout Operations: exceptions often provide valuable information about where processes, systems or information flows are not operating as expected.

Process Governance & Documentation

Another significant responsibility during this period was strengthening and maintaining process documentation.

I was responsible for creating and obtaining approval for key governance documents, including:

• Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

• Work Instructions

• Process Checkpoints

• Operational Checklists

The objective was not simply to document how activities were performed, but to ensure that the process, responsibilities, controls and operating requirements were clearly defined and consistently understood.

I was also responsible for maintaining historical process records and documentation repositories.

This required ensuring that documentation remained aligned with the operating environment as processes, systems and automation continued to evolve.

Management Information & Oversight

As process ownership expanded, management information became another important part of my responsibilities.

I was responsible for ensuring that the required MIS and operational reporting were provided to senior management at the agreed frequencies, giving stakeholders visibility into process performance and areas requiring attention.

Together with exception monitoring, process documentation and operational controls, these reporting mechanisms provided an increasingly structured way of overseeing processes that had grown considerably in both scale and complexity since I first joined the organisation.

What this period taught me

By this stage of my career, my perspective on Operations had changed substantially.

I had started in 2018 processing individual customer requests. Five years later, my responsibilities included leading people, governing processes, supporting automation and change, resolving reconciliation exceptions, maintaining process documentation and providing management oversight across a much larger operating environment.

More importantly, I had learnt to look beyond whether an individual transaction had been processed successfully.

I increasingly found myself asking:

Is the process clearly defined?
Are the right controls and checkpoints in place?
Where are exceptions occurring, and why?
Are responsibilities understood across teams?
Does management have sufficient information to identify problems?
What happens upstream and downstream when something goes wrong?

Those questions ultimately became an important bridge between my experience in Operations and my subsequent move towards Operational Risk Management.   

Awards & Recognition

Power of One (2022): Award for Outstanding individual performance

RPA 101 (2023): Award for project “Automation of Excess Refund”

Lend-A-Shoulder (2024): Employee Volunteering program under CSR Activity

Portfolio

Showcasing my skills, education, and experiences online.

Connect

shubhamghotankar@gmail.com

+32 0465 86 03 92

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