Author Bio (Long)¶
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Saurav Bhatia is the Founder and CEO of Yirifi.ai, a 20-person AI-powered regulatory intelligence startup enabling financial institutions to safely launch and scale blockchain initiatives. The company is building the world's largest centralized repository of global crypto regulations, case law, and risk scenarios. At Yirifi, just two people built 15 backoffice microsites in three months -- a proof point for what AI-first development makes possible, and one of the central case studies of his book.
Before founding Yirifi, Saurav spent nearly a decade at Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore and Hong Kong, where he was the founding executive behind two digital banks. As Interim CEO and Chief Customer & Product Officer of TRUST Bank -- Singapore's first digital bank -- he laid the foundation from the ground up: securing regulatory approval, establishing the joint venture with NTUC, building the team to 100+ employees, and defining the product vision. The bank has since grown to over 1 million clients, capturing approximately 20% market share.
Earlier, as founding CFO of Mox Bank in Hong Kong, he partnered with the CEO to secure the virtual banking license, develop the deployment strategy, and craft the joint venture structure with Standard Chartered. Mox became the most downloaded app in Hong Kong across all categories, earned a 4.8-star rating on the App Store, and scaled to 750,000 clients capturing 12% market share. Saurav recommended the early adoption of Thought Machine's blockchain-based core banking system, now an industry standard for new banks.
Across his Standard Chartered tenure, Saurav also served as Global Head of Digital Assets for Retail, Private and Wealth -- leading the bank's strategy for CBDCs, tokenization, Web3, and cryptocurrency investing -- and as Global Head of Finance for Group Retail Banking, managing financial strategy, FP&A, and client analytics for a $5 billion retail operation spanning 9 million clients in 32 countries.
Before Standard Chartered, Saurav held progressive leadership roles at Citibank in Singapore over nine years, including Global Finance Head for Private Bank Operations & Technology and Asia Chief Operating Officer for Technology.
Saurav holds an MBA in Strategy and Finance from the National University of Singapore and completed the Oxford Blockchain Strategy Programme at Said Business School. He began his career as a founder -- building LP Technologies in India in 1999 -- and as a web strategist at IT&T Limited (later acquired by Capgemini).
He writes about AI, blockchain, and fintech at blog.sauravbhatia.com and is based in Singapore.
Blueprint for an AI-First Company draws on Saurav's 20+ years of building products, teams, and companies at the intersection of technology and finance -- and on the hard-won lessons of doing it all over again, this time with AI as the starting point rather than an afterthought.