Bharath is a partner with McKinsey’s Singapore office, where he leads the firm’s work with payments in Asia, and is part of the banking, sustainability, and digital leadership teams. Over the past 15 years, Bharath has served a broad range of global, regional, and local institutions across banking, payments, fintech, wealth management, technology, and private equity on multiple cross-functional topics related to corporate strategy and M&A, sustainability, innovation, growth, and transformation. He has experience in building and scaling new ventures and has extensively worked across several markets in Asia, including most markets in Southeast Asia, Australia, India, and Greater China.
Examples of Bharath’s recent client work include the following:
- elevating ambition for a top-tier bank to get to net-zero emission and lead a country’s transition, including designing a net-zero portfolio strategy and glidepath for the power sector
- setting up a new data and analytics platform business for a leader in Southeast Asia to drive transition financing with ease and scale
- supporting a large regulator in defining top moves to become a sustainable finance hub in the region
- rehauling the corporate strategy for an industry payments utility to lead across small merchants, online, and QR-based transactions
- serving multiple merchant business payments specialist with strategy and transformation
- assisting multiple due diligence for mobile wallet companies, acquirers, and payment schemes across operational, commercial, and regulatory levels
- launching and scaling new digital consumer-finance business across regional Southeast Asian markets by leveraging new analytical methods and nontraditional data
- transforming a regional bank’s consumer-finance business to be agile, introducing new ways of working through reformatting structure, people, process, and technology
- serving multiple global and regional payments groups with growth and market expansion strategies
- assisting a bank in conceiving and designing a market-entry strategy across three Southeast Asian markets
- supporting a Singaporean bank with launching an innovative mobile-only bank in regional markets
- defining a digital transformation roadmap for multiple banks, insurers, and wealth managers in the region and supporting many in executing it to scale
- helping a large global insurer develop a digital ecosystem strategy across six Asian markets
- supporting a bank in Hong Kong with its digital transformation program, including organization design and digital factory set-up
Prior to joining McKinsey, Bharath held leadership roles at two other global management consulting firms where he focused on financial services and digital banking across Asia–Pacific.