Gururaj Banakar

International Private Banking / Asset Wealth Management

Tribe Lead - Digital Doc Delivery, COB, KYC & Life cycle Management

AI Product Innovation & Prototyping

▪ Brought an AI-first approach to internal product development, using the firm's enterprise LLM suite to rapidly prototype business applications and validate concepts ahead of formal engineering build-out.
▪ Independently designed and built multiple internal business portals through AI-assisted (“vibe-coded”) development — creating front-end interfaces, business rules, and request/response API logic — with roughly 80% of application functionality completed before handoff to engineering for hosting, security hardening, and integration.
▪ Applied prompt engineering to iteratively refine AI-generated code and business logic, shortening the path from idea to working prototype.
▪ Currently extending this practice through the AI Generalist Accelerator Program (2026), applying training in context engineering, RAG fundamentals, and agentic workflow design to ongoing product initiatives.

AI-Enabled Product Delivery

▪ Initiated and led an AI-enabled self-service platform for paperless eligibility determination, leveraging enterprise LLM capabilities to deliver explainable decisioning — reduced production queries by 50%, accelerated discrepancy resolution by 50–70%, and achieved 80% user adoption.

Core Product Leadership

• Fostered deep relationships with delivery partners, collaborating with senior leaders in Front Office, Tech, Design, Operations and Control functions (Legal, Risk & Compliance).
• Chaired Working Group calls to resolve control issues and enhance client and document adoption of paperless delivery.
• Spearheaded a negative consent campaign transitioning 5,000+ private banking clients across EMEA and APAC to paperless statements, generating ~$600K in annual cost savings.
• Conducted detailed analysis of business processes, identifying product development opportunities for digital document delivery, Onboarding and Client Lifecycle Management products across the client journey.
• Streamlined internal processes by implementing best practices in product management, increasing team efficiency and productivity.
• Functionalities include Party & Account Maintenance, KYC, Periodic Review, CDD checks, AML screening, Client Risk Rating, Routine Updates, Account creation, documents capturing, Online doc delivery.
• Managed Agile Scrum teams – Delivery of value through coordinated efforts of multiple squads, ensuring alignment between squads and with broader Product goals, Continuous improvement of processes and practices resulting in a 30% increase in sprint efficiency and accelerated time-to-market for key product features.
• Monitored the progress & escalated and redefined the scope when necessary.
• Oversaw product development, ensuring the definition of the BOW, testing, support, and enhancement of technology.
• Adhered to Wealth Management’s framework for CLM and electronic doc delivery, chairing a clearing house for electronic delivery across WM business streams.
• Efficiently drove teams to deliver a robust set of milestones
• Evaluated and mitigated risks, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies in the product development lifecycle.
• Developed clear documentation of scope, business requirements, use cases, and workflows to support UX research, design, and development.
• Used JIRA for writing user stories and maintaining the product backlog.

Client: UBS Bank, Singapore Nov 2015 – Feb 2018

Department : 1WMP – Credit Risk Control (CRC), Operations Change Group

· Act as a link between the business divisions and the solution providers for all aspects of identifying, testing and implementing Bank's Credit Risk Applications and Solutions. And leading the migration program.

· Solid experience in Credit risk process within Wealth Banking – that includes facility limit setting and exposure management, risk mitigation & collateral management, pledging, credit sanctioning & approval, credit risk monitoring, reporting.

Department : Derivatives Regulatory Reforms, Operations Change Group

· Participating in industry working forums run by ISDA, DTCC etc. to provide feedback on various regulatory consultation papers issued by various regulators.

· Work closely with the APAC Derivatives Regulatory Reform (DRR) Program lead to ensure that risks and issues are highlighted and escalated in a timely fashion for decision in project working groups or Steer Cos.

Client: Credit-Suisse, Singapore Feb 2014 – Oct 2015

Position Title : Senior BA - Digital Private Banking ( DPB), Client Reporting

· Involved in implementation of Derivative (DX) module and impact analysis from Front Solutions and Client Reporting perspective. Which involves product such as OTC Security Options, Listed Futures and FX Exotics. Main applications includes Temenos T24 and Wealth Manager, Assentis.

· Handling requirements with respective to data mapping, MTM and Performance calculations, portfolio holdings, Transactions, graphs and report content.

• The Rates Management Solution (RMS) is a Group Finance strategic initiative to re-platform and enhance existing tactical solutions, to pull Market Data (from Bloomberg, Reuters, Broker files, etc.) for various Asset Classes, process it and load it into front office, valuation and other market rate dependent systems for the purposes of valuation and Risk Mgt
• Coordinating with Market data Providers viz., Reuters, Bloomberg for new interfaces for page shredding as per RMS data sourcing requirements across
• FX,IR,EQ spot and derivative products and resolve any discrepancies

• Facilitated workshops and discussions with business users (Front Office/Middle Office), regional subject matter experts, and demand teams to gather business requirements.
• Accountable for collecting accurate business requirements, conducting impact analysis from both business and functional perspectives, and rationalizing specific needs. Responsible for determining Level 0 effort estimates.
• Analyzed existing system functionalities and collaborated with business and product teams to assess the functional implications of proposed changes.
• Prepared Business Requirement Documents (BRD) using the Blue Print Requirement Centre tool.
• Developed solutions in coordination with cross-functional and development teams.
• Coordinated with other product teams regarding Functional Specification documents, including reviewing and signing off on FS documentation.
• Well-versed in the following modules:

Treasury Convergence: Money Market, Foreign Exchange, Option Pricer, and URS.
Structured Products: Equity Linked Notes (ELN), Dual Currency Notes (DCN), EYA, MLA, etc.

• Implemented several FLEXCUBE projects in Banking, Mutual Fund and Insurance domains.
• Experience in FX, MM and Securities (Equity & FI) & Derivative modules of Flexcube.