CIOs are making the workload easy for organizations to deal with the constant updation of cutting-edge technologies and consumer behavior. The immense help through strategic guidance and vision from CIOs are providing ample benefits to global industries. One such eminent CIO, Himanshu Sharma of Fair Fintech, is known for taking full responsibility for the company with expert technical skills and knowledge of software development. As a CIO, he is strategically sound with mentoring skills and focuses on the customer base to enhance the brand.
Fair Fintech is a Neobank and financial services platform. Fair is a membership-based fintech that aims to empower consumers with ethical banking, lending, investments, and retirement services that improve traditional, profit-driven banking models. It operates exclusively online without traditional physical branch networks. As Neobanks have no branches, their overheads are significantly lower, which helps to reduce the overall fees. In addition, it has partnerships with traditional banks to federally insure customer deposits. As a result, money deposited in a Neo-banking account is secure with Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance.
Benefits that Fair provides to its customers include Neobanking without hidden fees, debit cards, access to over 55,000 Allpoint ATMs with no additional fees, spending accounts, up to 2-day early access to direct deposit funds, FairPay to send money to other Fair members, seamless bill payments, international money transfers with no fees, debit cards for kids with no fees, as well as high-yield dividend accounts that pay up to 4% annually.
Fair practices socially responsible investing (SRI), is an approach to investing that reduces exposure to companies deemed to have a negative social impact, such as companies that profit from poor labor standards, harmful products, or environmental devastation. Fair also practices environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) investing measures. ESG investing focuses on the sustainability of an investment and its overall impact.
Himanshu Sharma is the Chief Information Officer of Fair Fintech. He is an IT leader who is highly focused, value-driven, and has an engineering mindset across various technologies. He is well-known for bringing well-rounded and cross-functional 19 years of experience in application development, enterprise architecture, digital transformation, technology management, resource management, and cybersecurity.
He is currently building Neobank, Fair Fintech, Inc. while leading the IT and development team. Recently, Himanshu has released FairPay mobile banking app for iPhone and Android users. He has built the state-of-the-art Membership Portal, a single window to provide Fair customers with banking and financial services. He has successfully implemented advanced operations services using automation, data sciences, and AI technology to reduce the manual work in Fair Fintech.
In 2015, he established TechJuly, an IT training company. TechJuly's mission is to create world-class technologists by personalizing and individualizing training to address the massive skills gap in the IT industry. It provides self-paced online learning, virtual instructor-led training, on-the-job training, implementation, and hands-on experience through labs, mentoring, and peer-to-peer learning. In addition, it provides training to experienced IT professionals who want to upskill or switch their careers and for fresh graduates starting their IT career on the right foot.
Himanshu built the jGallery App, a solution to transfer, share, and backup media files like photos and videos. This suite comes with Mac, iPhone, and Android apps with cloud integration. It helps users quickly find, tag, and share media with friends and family. jGallery allows transferring videos, photos, and documents from one device to another. The App is highly-rated and has more than 50K installs on the Google Play store.
He is an eminent advisor and investor in various startups mentoring young entrepreneurs and helping establish multiple startups in the US and India.
The banking and financial sector are moving from conventional time-consuming processes to cloud environments through digital transformation. CIOs are flexible in adopting changes and making a huge difference in industries. Similarly, Himanshu is a seasoned professional and has taken various leadership positions in large organizations such as US Bank, IBM, Genpact, and more while being a part of multiple startups and playing a crucial role in their success. He is a pioneer in Open Banking APIs and setting up standards for banking API in the prepaid card industry. Himanshu has also led digital transformation at multiple banks and migrated hundreds of applications in the cloud from the legacy environment while building a center of excellence. He played a crucial role in establishing US Bank prepaid cards processor and program management unit. In addition, he built robust products like banking mobile apps and ePayStub, which millions of customers in the US have cherished over the last decade.
That being said, he has received multiple awards for his contribution to banking and building the prepaid solution for the underbanked and unbanked US population.
The constant changes in the IT sector can be difficult for organizations to keep in touch with among all other workloads. Moreover, vetting the right technology and solution is challenging since current business processes are complex and multi-stage, touching multiple client vendors. Thus, Himanshu expresses that the primary challenge he experienced was to decide between different technologies/solutions and pick the right one, which could lead to better and stable business growth. However, the ongoing journey has helped him gain a more comprehensive knowledge of IT development processes, understand various business domains and cave out the right career path for himself.
According to Himanshu, a leading CIO should combine broader technology and domain knowledge with a strong understanding of business processes, IT processes, and people management.
Organizations are instigated to focus on technological innovation with appropriate data sets and information to adopt digitization. Innovation is vital for gaining customer engagement through constant improvements efficiently. As a CIO of a reputed company, Himanshu mentions that the importance of design thinking helps in building multiple prototypes and iteratively improving the designs. The company is focused on data-driven decision-making for product design and improvements. The team uses analytics and reporting to understand the user behavior and provide a better solution using A-B testing.
Conventional methods were time-consuming and expensive for companies to stand out in the competitive market. But, with cutting-edge technologies and an ample supply of data, it is possible to be a brand in cost-efficient ways. Himanshu says that he has experienced a significant improvement in business efficiency by using automation and analytics. In addition, the cutting-edge technologies help reduce financial risk and efficient use of digital channels with advances in cybersecurity. He considers that the overall operation cost reduction and improvement in the bottom line can be achieved by leveraging advanced technologies efficiently.
Financial services are essential in the world for different kinds of payment transactions across all industries. Nowadays, users are preferring the digital mode for seamless transactions over the use of cash in hand. Hence, Himanshu foresees significant growth over the next decade, and the team will be helping customers by reducing the cost of banking and better services. He claims that the key focus will be to bring more and better financial services to the Fair platform. According to PwC, Neobanks will grow exponentially and are expected to grow at 46.5% CAGR between 2019 and 2026, generating around USD 394.6 billion by 2026. It is guaranteed that Neobanks will transform the banking industry and bring a similar level of changes as eCommerce to the retail sector.
A load of experiences can push a man towards perfection. Success will come if there is a passion for learning from experiences as well as other eminent people. For the aspiring CIOs, Himanshu advises, "Learn as many IT technologies as possible and find the business use for them. Understand the business processes, and try to make them efficient using technology. Efficiency and quality are the mantras!"
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