Driving Smart Decision-Making Through Artificial Intelligence and Data Science

In the current times, when all consumer and client centric businesses are accelerating their digital transformation, it becomes essential for business to be mindful of embedding simplicity and personalization in their customer experience. Consumers are now used to living in a highly digital world. They expect most of their experiences similar to one-touch ordering of food or cab on their devices. Yet many financial institutions still largely rely on legacy technology and provide very less transparency and ease of use to their customers. Transforming how customers manage their personal finance was the primary inspiration behind Clarity Money. Clarity Money, launched in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Adam Dell, is a personal finance mobile app that acts as your financial champion. Ushering in a new era of mobile personal finance management apps, Clarity Money uses artificial intelligence and data science to help consumers make smarter financial decisions and get the most from their money. Vishal is a founding and early employee of Clarity Money, where he serves as Head of Data, building the algorithms and models that enable Clarity Money's revolutionary features like allowing users to manage their recurring payments, estimate their income and create budget based on their spending patterns.  

Innovation & Impact 

Managing personal finance is getting more complex by each day. There are plenty of financial products to choose from. In addition to that as the gig economy takes off and more businesses charge consumers on a recurring basis, a combination of irregular income cycle but regular spending cycle is hard to digest and plan around. Vishal as an early employee worked with the founders of Clarity Money on a patent-pending innovative solution that identifies the recurrence pattern using a combination of rules–based engine and mathematical transforms. The recurring bill feature on Clarity Money app was one of the most well received features by consumers as well as the industry in general. Many competitors quickly followed suit by offering similar features that magnified the benefits of the innovation. Within a year of launch, Clarity Money witnessed tremendous success as the app was downloaded by more than a million users. In 2018, Clarity Money was acquired by Goldman Sachs's digital first consumer bank, Marcus. Vishal continues to serve as Head of Data for the digital storefront business at Marcus. 

A Data-Versed Leader 

Vishal started his career at IBM India Software Labs where he published numerous defensive papers and worked with researchers on new algorithms to process very large tree-based documents. He then enrolled at Columbia University where in his capacity as a Research and Teaching Assistant, worked with professors to offer the University's first cloud computing course and worked in finding and fixing vulnerabilities in small operating systems. Thereafter, Vishal joined Barclays Investment Bank where he and his team worked on a major data and digital transformation project to modernize the risk, trade and analytics data reporting, winning the annual CIO award. He then joined Bluefly, a well-known ecommerce platform, where he managed the data infrastructure and built recommendation engines generating millions of dollars in revenue. Vishal later joined About.com where he worked on data infrastructure that supported petabytes of data as well as bot detection algorithms.  

Vishal is passionate about creating new business value and products by solving challenging problems utilizing innovation in data engineering, data science and software/algorithmic engineering. As a well-respected technology leader, Vishal has been invited to judge numerous hackathons and business plan competitions at universities like the John Hopkins University, Wharton Business School and Princeton University. He is also a senior member of IEEE, a member of ACM and an invited member of International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (organizer of The Webby awards). He has won numerous intra-company and industry awards such as IBM Graduate Scholarship Award, Barclays CIO Award, Webby honoree and Appy Award in the finance category. He advises a few non-profit foundations and is a strong proponent of open source software. Vishal holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from Columbia University and an undergrad degree in Engineering from Cochin University.