Witad Awards 2021: Risk professional of the year—Sujata Dasgupta, Tata Consultancy Services

Sujata Dasgupta never anticipated that her stumble into IT services would lead her to where she is today. In 2006, she left her comfortable banking job at State Bank of India, the largest bank in India, and joined IBM as an IT consultant for banking and financial services.

What many of those close to her thought had been a mistake—moving from a secure government job to the private sector and in a different industry at that—turned out to be what Dasgupta refers to as her “destiny.” 

That move was not without its challenges, though, and a mere six months into her new IT role at IBM, she, too, started to believe that the decision had been a mistake. But deep down, Dasgupta, now the head of global advisory for financial crimes and operations risk management at Tata Consultancy Services, believed she had the potential, and riding on her strong banking background—which isn’t easily found in the IT industry—she poured her soul into finding her footing. “It has been almost 15 years now in the IT world, and I can confidently say that this is where I have always belonged—my ‘mistake’ was more of my destiny,” she says. 

Since her move, Dasgupta has become passionate about learning to apply advanced technology and data in analytics, machine learning, robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), and data privacy-enhancing technologies within the banking and financial services risk and compliance space. She continues to drive the fight against fraud and other financial crimes, and often shares her ideas on future-proofing enterprise risk management with industry peers.

Her focus is on using data-driven and AI solutions to prevent, intercept, and mitigate such risks. “Continuous enterprise risk and controls assessment, risk modeling and validation, scenario analysis, analyzing operational incidents and their impacts all require processing huge volumes and varieties of data,” Dasgupta says. 

She believes this is where AI and machine-learning solutions can help enhance the effectiveness and improve the efficiency of these risk management functions.