Kaustubh Deshpande

Kaustubh Deshpande is a seasoned financial services leader, with a corporate & entrepreneurial career spanning two decades. He thrives at the crossroads of business and technology, unlocking new avenues of growth & value for global capability centers.

While navigating diverse global senior leadership roles, Kaustubh has not only scaled multimillion-dollar business lines, but also catalyzed the evolution of global capability centres into mature transformation hubs. His story manifests through a value-engineering mindset and encompasses re-imagining of business models, contextualizing financial services, and orchestrating pivotal shifts from back-office to center-office.

In his current role at Société Générale, Kaustubh is architecting a transformative strategy to extract maximum value and growth from the globally distributed shared services centers across India and Europe. His mandate includes incubating & growing diverse capabilities into globally recognized expertise centers (encompassing Cybersecurity, Business & IT Transformations, Data & AI, ESG, and Regulatory Compliance amongst others). He also sponsors & champions the role of the centres in accelerating global digital transformation and optimizing business efficiencies through re-imagination, mutualization, and industrialization. A fervent advocate of value innovation, Kaustubh also leads an incubation hub that infuses experimentation on emerging technologies, brings outside-in market intelligence and fosters multi-faceted ecosystems (comprising start-ups, academia, & service partners).

In a prior entrepreneurial venture, Kaustubh co-founded a fintech horizontal platform that harnessed conversational AI to deliver contextualized financial services. He has worked with prominent global organizations (IHS Markit, Fidelity Investments & Wipro Technologies) across multi-faceted domains of presales, marketing, consulting, technology, operations and product management.

Kaustubh is fueled by a passion for crafting unique employee experiences and mentoring women leaders to maximize their potential.