AI, Algorithms & Alpha — The Future of Finance | Pune

Dr. Ganesh Natarajan is Executive Chairman and Co-Promoter of GTT Data Solutions, Lighthouse Communities Foundation and 5F World. He is also Chairman of Honeywell Automation India Ltd and EPPS and a Board Director of Hinduja Global, Educate Girls, 1 Crowd Investors, SBI Payments and Skills Alpha.

Ganesh has a Bachelors’ Degree in Mechanical Engineering from BIT Mesra, Masters’ in Industrial Engineering from IIM Mumbai, PhD from IIT Bombay and Advanced Management qualifications from Harvard Business School. He has received the Distinguished Alumnus Award of BIT Mesra, IIT Bombay and NITIE (now IIM Mumbai)  and has been recognized by EY and the Asia Pacific HR Forum for excellence in technology entrepreneurship and people-centric leadership.  He completed two successful CEO tenures over twenty-five years at APTECH and Zensar Technologies. Harvard Business School has written and teaches two case studies on Dr. Ganesh Natarajan and his success through Vision Communities and Innovation.

Ganesh commenced his career with manufacturing firm Crompton Greaves Ltd, did a three-year entrepreneurial stint and then headed Mumbai Region and Corporate Consulting and Training in IT Education and Consulting firm NIIT. He became CEO of APTECH in 1991 and grew the company to be a global market leader with over 1200 computer training centres in forty-two countries. In twenty-four of these countries including China, APTECH became the market leader. He also served on the Board of Hexaware Technologies and left the group in 2001 after listing APTECH on the London Stock Exchange.

Between 2001 and 2016, Ganesh was Managing Director of Zensar Technologies Ltd. He grew the company’s revenues over fifteen times and made it a leader in providing digital transformation solutions for manufacturing, retail and financial services firms. Most of the work was for Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 organisations in the USA and Europe. During the last five years of Ganesh’s tenure as CEO, Zensar recorded a market value of forty-four percent CAGR, a record in the stock markets for the technology industry. During his tenure, Ganesh lived and worked in India, UK and the USA.

After 2016, Ganesh has been a successful entrepreneur and investor, building companies with a successful track record of digital deployment  and skills and livelihoods transformation. He has served as independent director of State Bank of India group and also chaired IT Strategy at the Board level for the Bank. He has also served on the Boards of Social Venture Partners India and International and Principal Asset Management, led HBS Club of India as President and served on the national councils of CII, NASSCOM and AIMA.

The current investment companies where he plays a Board role are…

• Sustain & Save, in the Sustainability & ESG space
• POSHS Group in Steel Products Manufacturing
• EPPS, an ERP for Defence & Manufacturing
• Arise Ventures, CSVP Fund and 1 Crowd Fund

Ganesh is the author of fourteen books and a regular writer and speaker at national and international forums. His last three business books on Digital Success, Facing up to the China Challenge and India’s Pathways to Success have been best sellers and recipient of business book awards.

He is focused on skills, employment and entrepreneurship generation in the country and strongly believes that Indian youth can contribute significantly to Viksit Bharat – a developed India.

Shailendra Abhyankar is the Founder & CEO of FinSoftAi, where he is building AI-driven Social Sentiment Insights (SSi) to help investors and traders gain early insights into market-moving narratives from global news and social media — providing a potential edge in making more timely, winning investment and trading decisions.

SSi ingests data from over 80,000 news sources and investor communities such as Reddit, Stocktwits and BlueSky, applying advanced machine learning to quantify sentiment, social buzz, and data quality signals around publicly traded companies. These insights are combined with price momentum and are actively used in live trading strategies, creating an iterative feedback loop between AI-driven insights and market execution to improve signal relevance and win-loss ratios over time. A key objective is improving the signal-to-noise ratio in information flows to surface actionable insights.

Earlier in his career, Shailendra led Innovation Centers for Bank of New York Mellon in India. He earlier served as Managing Director at SunGard (now FIS), where he led the development of several products across Capital Markets, Asset Management, and Wealth Management, and at Tata Consultancy Services, where he led their Global Delivery Center in Budapest, Hungary.

Shailendra is an Electrical Engineer from IISc Bangalore and has completed the Executive Leadership Program from Cornell University.

Chetan Mehra has over two decades of experience in building trading and portfolio management models for global markets across asset classes. He has managed global equity and multi asset portfolios. He specialises in systematic trading and has interests stochastic processes, data generating processes, machines learning as well as complex and adaptive systems.He holds a PhD in Computer Science