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CAMS IIT-M Fintech Innovation Lab
CAMS IIT-M Fintech Innovation Lab
Tech Space to Finnovate

Profile of Board Members

​​Dr. Mahesh Panchagnula

Dr. Ashwin Mahalingam joined the faculty in the Building Technology and Construction Management division of the Civil engineering department at IIT-Madras in 2006. Ashwin received his B.Tech in Civil engineering from IIT-Madras and then proceeded to Stanford University for a Masters in Construction Engineering and Management. He then helped start up an internet based company in the USA called All Star Fleet, aimed at providing asset management services for construction companies. Following this he returned to Stanford University to pursue a PhD in the area of Infrastructure Project Management. Ashwin's research interests are in the areas of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) in Infrastructure planning and management, the management and governance of large engineering projects and the use of technology in infrastructure development. Ashwin is also a co-founder of Okapi Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd and serves as a Director on the Board. He is the Editor of the Engineering Project Organization Journal (EPOJ) and has served on many national committees.  

​​Dr. M. Thenmozhi

Dr. M.Thenmozhi is a Professor in Department of Management Studies of Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai with more than 32 years of academic experience.  She has also been the Director of National Institute of Securities Markets, Mumbai. Prior to joining IIT Madras, she was working as a Faculty in the Management Division of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Anna University, Chennai.  She has been ranked in "Top 100 Women in Finance in India" in 2019 and 2020 by AIWMA.  She specialises in applied and policy implications-based research in the domain of corporate finance, market microstructure and financial time series modelling. She has developed hybrid AI and Support Vector Machine based forecasting models for stock market trading and investing, models to test information transmission between markets, determinants of ETFs performance, Commodity market price discovery, impact of family and promoter driven firm’s governance and country level determinants of FDI  and Cross border acquisitions.

​​Mr. Anuj Kumar 

Mr. Anuj Kumar is the Managing Director of CAMS. He joined CAMS as a Chief Operating Officer – Asset Management Services on March, 2016 and was appointed as Whole time Director and CEO with effect from November 6, 2018. He was appointed as Managing Director with effect from 1st August 2021.

 He joined CAMS after 25 years of professional experience with Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd., Blow Plast Limited, Escorts Finance Limited, BillJunction Payments Limited, IBM India Private Limited and Concentrix Daksh Services India Private Limited.

 He holds a Bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi and a Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) from IIM, Kolkata.

​​Mr. Ram Charan Sesharaman   

Mr. Ram Charan Sesharaman joined CAMS as Chief Financial Officer- Designate in March 2020. He was appointed as Chief Financial Officer with effect from 1st August 2021.

He joined CAMS after 22 years of experience with organisations like TVS , SSI , Lason India , Photon Interactive and Reliance Jio. He holds a Bachelor degree in Commerce from University of Madras and is a qualified Chartered Accountant.


​​Prof. John Augustine     

John Augustine is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He holds a PhD from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine. His research interests are in distributed algorithms specifically focusing on distributed trust issues that emerge in settings where participants may behave maliciously. He has co-authored many refereed articles that have appeared in highly reputed conferences (SODA, FOCS, PODC, NEURIPS, DISC, SPAA, IPDPS, etc.) and journals (Algorithmica, SICOMP, TCS, JPDC, TPDS, etc). 

He was the chair of the distributed computing track at ICDCN 2022 and is currently serving as an associate editor at the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. At IIT Madras, he is a founding member of the Cryptography, Cybersecurity, and Distributed Trust group (CCD) as well as the Blockchain Innovation Centre (BiC). He is also affiliated with the Theory group in CSE..

​​Mr. Kaushik Narayanan     

Mr. Kaushik Narayan is the Founder & CEO of Fintuple. An industry veteran with more than 25 years of experience in financial services and related technologies. His focus for Fintuple is to build digital product capabilities which aims at connecting the Indian capital markets ecosystem. Prior to Fintuple, he was Head of Digital for Big4 consulting firms in the US, such as Accenture & Capgemini. His accolades include ‘Top 50 Tech Leaders’ in the World in 2019, ’Top Innovator’ for his work in Digital Transformation for GE Power and has won ‘Digital Acumen’ award by an India-based publisher. Kaushik holds a Bachelor’s degree from BITS Pilani and MBA from Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University).   

​​Mr. Ravi Kethana

Ravi Kethana is the Chief Platform Officer of CAMS. He joined CAMS on December 10, 2019. Ravi provides strategic direction and leadership to the Technology Infrastructure team & Product Management Group in CAMS and to Sterling Software. He joined CAMS after 29 years of professional experience in the IT sector with TCS & Wipro. He has built capability & expertise in diverse areas of technology, especially in application development, large scale core process design and system transformation. He has executed on assignments both in the domestic and global markets. He holds a Bachelor degree in Technology (Electronics and Communication Engineering) from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University and a Master degree in Technology (Electronics) from Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU).

​​Dr. Nandan Sudarsanam           

Nandan Sudarsanam is a faculty member in the Department of Management Studies and a core member of the Robert Bosch Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) at IIT Madras. He earned his PhD from the Engineering Systems Division at MIT, following which, he worked as a quantitative researcher for five years at a high-frequency algorithmic trading firm in New York. His research and work experience focuses on applications of experimentation, machine learning and the abstraction of data to models and algorithms. This spans data and problems across different domains, including but not limited to finance, urban mobility, digital platforms, civic services, and criminology. He publishes in machine learning conferences as well as peer-reviewed journals in engineering and applied statistics.