Gazzali Zayn GAZZALI ZAYN OPEN TO PRODUCT LEADERSHIP Ask Gazzali.ai /

Gazzali
Zayn.

Fintech Product Manager building Banking-as-a-Service from the ground up — designing the bank flows behind embedded finance, and shipping AI tooling that turns days of analysis into minutes.

▷  Ask Gazzali.ai Read the resume LinkedIn ↗
FD AUM / MONTH
₹400Cr+
scaled from ₹0 at Upswing
PERSONAL LOANS
₹100Cr / mo
monthly disbursal · zero → ₹100Cr
SECURED CARDS
2L+issued
FD-backed credit cards shipped
BANK INTEGRATIONS
15+live
Banks · SFBs · NBFCs unified
PARTNERS ON TOP
40+B2C
distributed via SDKs & APIs
§01 · Operator profile

A product leader
who builds.

Engineer-turned-PM with an IIM MBA. The flows that move money between partner banks and end-users — that's his medium.

Gazzali Zayn is a Product Manager and Computer Science Engineer with an IIM MBA and 14+ years across fintech, e-commerce, travel, and enterprise software. He is currently Product Solutions Lead at Upswing, a Banking-as-a-Service fintech where he is part of the core team.

At Upswing he owned the design of the end-to-end bank integration flows that power the platform — work that helped scale the product from ₹0 → ₹400 Cr+ in monthly fixed-deposit AUM, and extended the same technology into secured credit cards and personal loans.

His core strength is financial product orchestration: designing the flows, validations, and funnels that connect partner banks, regulatory requirements, and end-user journeys into a reliable product. He has consistently pushed KYC and payment funnels well past industry benchmarks.

More recently he has become a hands-on builder of AI tooling — designing, building, and deploying AI agents single-handedly that compress product and engineering workflows from days into minutes. Earlier roles at Zilingo, Teletext Holidays, MAQ Software, and Tata Consultancy Services give him an unusually strong engineering foundation beneath his product judgement.

§02 · Career trajectory

Engineer → MBA →
Product Leader.

A single, deliberate arc: a CS engineer who built systems for banks and telecoms, learned the business at IIM, and has spent a decade shipping product — culminating in core-team fintech.

Engineering & architecture track Leadership & product track
Anna University
B.E. — Computer Science Engineering
Foundation: systems, algorithms, distributed computing.
2010
Tata Consultancy Services
Software Developer · System Engineer · Chennai
Built Java interface systems for a global telecom IMS. Drove support tickets from 50–100/wk → 1–5/wk. Star of the Month · Client Award.
2011 → 2014
2014 → 2016
IIM Udaipur
MBA · Post Graduate Programme
Transition from engineer to operator. Strategy, finance, and product-market thinking on top of the CS foundation.
2016 → 2018
MAQ Software
Product Manager · Hyderabad
Designed a financial reporting system covering up to 40% of P&L. Delivered large-scale migrations with zero unscheduled downtime.
2018 → 2019
Teletext Holidays (Zen3 UK)
Product Manager · Hyderabad
Grew monthly revenue +47%, team +75%. Initiated the company's ML capability — ASR (Kaldi) and a Voice Bot (AWS Lex). Optimized AWS spend by ~$10K/mo. Scored 120/100 in first appraisal.
2019 → 2023
Zilingo
Senior Product Manager · Bengaluru
Owned end-to-end delivery across web, hybrid, and mobile. Built ownership-based squads on a microservices architecture. Established and led the Data Science team. 5-hour QA cycles cut to 20 minutes via automation.
2023 → NOW
Upswing Fintech · CORE TEAM
Product Solutions Lead · Bengaluru
Designed end-to-end bank flows for a BaaS platform. ₹0 → ₹400 Cr+ monthly FD AUM. 15+ banks · 40+ B2C partners · 2L+ FD-backed credit cards · ₹100 Cr+/mo personal loan disbursal.
§03 · Selected experience

Built. Scaled.
Hardened in production.

Where the numbers come from. Upswing is the centrepiece — read it in three parts: what the team shipped, what Gazzali owned personally, and the AI tooling he built alone.

Upswing FintechCore Team
Product Solutions Lead · Banking-as-a-Service · Embedded Finance
Jun 2023 — Present
Bengaluru, India
Fintech · BaaS
A. What the team built & shipped
  • Core-team member — built Upswing from zero.
  • Shipped a first-of-its-kind B2B product: book a Fixed Deposit in under 60 seconds, with no bank account required.
  • Unified BaaS supply layer integrating 15+ Banks, SFBs & NBFCs.
  • Democratised that supply to 40+ B2C partners via standardised SDKs & APIs.
  • Scaled FD deposits ₹0 → ₹400 Cr+ monthly AUM (projected ₹1,000 Cr in 18 mo).
  • Extended stack to Secured Credit Cards — 2L+ cards issued.
  • Extended stack to Personal Loans — ₹0 → ~₹100 Cr/mo disbursal (projected ₹500 Cr in 12 mo).
B. Personal ownership · Product Manager
  • Sole owner of end-to-end bank flow design through the first two years of inception.
  • Partnered directly with multiple bank teams to solution and co-build integration flows.
  • Owned the integration team delivering flow & API integration — including code & flow review.
  • Standardised the integration framework — every new bank goes live in under 2 weeks to production.
  • Solutioned bank-side flows to automate refunds, removing manual operational dependency.
  • Designed product flows with layered validations for fraud detection & RBI regulatory compliance.
  • Personal Loans flow: 60%+ offer-to-conversion vs. industry 30–40%.
  • End-to-end PL fraud checks — UIDAI Demographic Auth, in-journey validations, Address Triangulation, Digital FI.
  • Payments flow — UPI Autopay (SIP), E-Mandate, NetBanking across multiple aggregators with backup failover.
  • Continuous monitoring of every checkpoint: Dedupe, AML, EKYC, VKYC, Demographic.
  • Stood up proactive alerting, dashboards & reporting to surface issues early.
  • Groomed multiple team members into independent ICs.
EKYC SUCCESS
48%→90%
VKYC SUCCESS
40%→80%
PAYMENT SUCCESS
50%→75%
C. AI tooling built single-handedly

Three AI agents designed, built, deployed and maintained alone, at near-zero cost — see the Builder's Terminal ↓ below.

Zilingo
Senior Product Manager · E-commerce & apparel manufacturing tech
Jun 2019 — 2023
Bengaluru, India
E-Commerce · B2B
  • Owned end-to-end delivery of critical technical programs across web, hybrid & mobile.
  • Led product roadmap discussions; prioritized sales requests vs. roadmap.
  • Ran requirement analysis, feature budgeting/invoicing, UI/UX reviews.
  • Led product acquisition — takeover, value analysis, knowledge-transition planning.
  • Transformed startup chaos into established processes — built ownership-based squads on a microservices architecture.
  • Introduced test-case-driven QA & automation — 5-hour cycle → 20 minutes.
  • Designed Day-1 tech recruitment at IITs/BITS & a 1.5-month fresher onboarding program.
  • Stood up the DevOps function and established & led the Data Science team.
  • Worked with multi-geo teams across IN, LK, BD, TH, ID.
  • Introduced SLA management for support across product surface.
Teletext Holidays (Zen3 UK)
Product Manager · Travel · GDS · reporting directly to CTO
Feb 2018 — Jun 2019
Hyderabad, India
Travel · GDS
  • Owned product vision, planning, design, usability & release quality for Zen3 UK BU.
  • Designed product with the client and top travel consultants; translated roadmaps into a managed backlog.
  • Managed a 16+ person BU — grew avg monthly revenue +47% & team size +75%.
  • Vendor management end-to-end — Amadeus, Diners Club International.
  • Optimised AWS cost — ~$10,000 / month savings.
  • Initiated the company's ML capability — Kaldi-based Automated Speech Recognition for call audits, plus an AWS Lex Voice Bot projected to cut call-centre headcount 15–20%.
  • Built a DevOps team from scratch.
  • Awarded 120/100 in first appraisal — highest in the company.
  • Multi-geo work across the US, LATAM, Australia & Japan.
MAQ Software
Product Manager · Enterprise reporting & analytics
Apr 2016 — Feb 2018
Hyderabad, India
Enterprise · BI
  • Gathered requirements; authored functional specs & low-level design docs.
  • Ran client meetings on SLAs, acceptance criteria, prioritisation & risk management.
  • Designed & managed a financial reporting system consolidating separate revenue & cost systems into a single model — up to 40% of the P&L sheet.
  • Identified opportunities to apply ML for revenue forecasting — won new business for the company.
  • Delivered large-scale system migrations with zero unscheduled downtime.
Tata Consultancy Services
Software Developer · System Engineer · Telecom & banking tech
Jan 2011 — May 2014
Chennai, India
Telecom · Banking
  • Migrated interface systems of a global telecom's Inventory Management System — a 4-year program.
  • Developed Java interface systems incl. a pricing module that fetched least-cost network nodes.
  • Led the support & maintenance team — reduced tickets 50–100/wk → 1–5/wk within a year.
  • Implemented telephony middleware updates for a leading UK retail & commercial bank.
  • Designed a business-performance dashboard used by top management.
  • Recognised with the Star of the Month, Client Award & Star Team Award.
§04 · Builder's Terminal

A product leader
who ships AI agents alone.

Three AI tools designed, built, deployed and maintained single-handedly at Upswing — at near-zero cost. Compressing product and engineering workflows from days into minutes.

// agents/built $ ls -la upswing/ai-tooling/   → 3 agents · all in production 001 — 003
AGENT / 001 FLAGSHIP

Funnel Analyzer

An AI agent that connects to the data warehouse, Grafana, Sentry and Amplitude via MCP servers — alongside the live codebase — to pinpoint funnel-drop root causes with high precision.

MCPGrafanaSentryAmplitudeData WarehouseCodebase RAG
// impact
Funnel root-cause: 1–2 days → minutes of a PM's time.
AGENT / 002

Claude-Skill
Bank Integration Automator

A set of custom skills that automate new-bank API integration end-to-end — from spec parsing to scaffolded integration code, validated against the standardised framework.

Claude SkillsBaaS Integration FrameworkAPI SpecsCodegen
// impact
New-bank API integration: −90% time · now < 10 minutes.
AGENT / 003

AI Mock System

Automatically generates mock responses based on incoming requests, integrated with Grafana MCP servers — decoupling QA & dev cycles from unstable upstream bank environments.

MCPGrafanaMock ServerQA Pipeline
// impact
Dev & QA decoupled from unstable bank sandboxes.

$  framing: "A product leader who builds — using AI to compress product and engineering workflows from days into minutes."

Case Studies · 4 deep dives
01 · This site's AI

Build vs. Buy: a self-hosted LLM?

Model selection, RAG vs. fine-tune, an eval harness, and the cost-crossover that decides it — ending in the disciplined "buy now, build past the crossover."

Eval harnessCost crossoverDecision matrix
Read →
02 · Health-tech

MyHPTracker — private by architecture

An OCR-free multimodal-LLM pipeline turns messy medical docs into a queryable profile. Provider-agnostic AI cut inference cost 6.5–17×.

Multimodal LLMPrivacy by designCost engineering
Read →
03 · Legal-tech

TenderAI — tender deviation analysis

A full-stack Next.js + FastAPI + Gemini platform that flags contract deviations and drafts clause-anchored query responses — human-in-the-loop.

FastAPIGeminiHuman-in-the-loop
Read →
04 · Behavioral AI

Rock, Paper, Scissors & Behavioral Patterns

A camera-based Rock·Paper·Scissors that learns a quirk you can't perceive — a teardown of behavioral-pattern personalization, with the game playable inside.

Behavioral modelingReinforcement learningPlayable demo
Read →
§05 · Capability matrix

Stack & specialisations.

Fintech Domain
Banking-as-a-Service Embedded Finance (SDK/API) Fixed Deposit / RD / SIP orchestration Personal Loans Secured Credit Cards EKYC / VKYC / CKYC UPI Autopay · E-Mandate · NetBanking Bureau & banking-based underwriting (BRE) Fraud detection & controls RBI regulatory compliance Payment aggregator integration & failover
Product Management
Product strategy & vision Roadmap governance Product discovery Requirement analysis Functional spec & LLD UI/UX reviews Prioritization frameworks Funnel optimization Product acquisition & knowledge transition Agile / Scrum (PMI-ACP)
AI & Technical
AI-driven product tooling MCP-based automation & AI agents Machine Learning Microservices architecture Java Scala C# SQL API design & integration
Leadership
Cross-functional team management Multi-geo team leadership Vendor management Tech recruitment & onboarding Agile transformation (multi-team) Mentoring ICs
Tools & Platforms
JIRA Visual Studio Online Grafana Sentry Amplitude AWS Power BI
§06 · Credentials

Education & certifications.

// EDUCATION

Post Graduate Programme · MBA
Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Udaipur
2016
B.E. Computer Science Engineering
Anna University
2010

// CERTIFICATIONS

PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)
Project Management Institute · Built multi-team agile process from scratch — backbone of company process
PMI
Oracle Certified Java Programmer
Oracle
OCJP
Cloud Data Science with Azure Machine Learning
Microsoft Certified
MS
IBM Certified WebSphere Professional
IBM
IBM
§07 · Open channel

Let's build the next
fintech rail.

Hiring for a core-team or senior product role in fintech / embedded finance? Drop a line — or ask the agent above to qualify the fit first.

// EMAIL↗
gazzalizayn13@gmail.com
// PHONE↗
+91 98842 85296
// LINKEDIN↗
linkedin.com/in/gazzali