# An Engineer's Tale: Q & A with Zeta CTO Ramki Gaddipati
source: https://developer.mastercard.com/blog/zeta_qa/index.md

Authors: Ramki Gaddipati. Dive into one of the leading lights of fintech development, Ramki Gaddipati, CTO of Zeta. We had the opportunity to sit down with Ramki to ask about his background, drives for today, and his thoughts on key industry trends. Let's start with some background info, can you tell us about yourself and how you got involved in this space? I am a techie at heart and I love to code in my free time. I co-founded Zeta with Bhavin in 2015 with a vision to make payments invisible. At Zeta, I built a banking and payment platform, called Tachyon, that replaces traditional core banking systems and mainframe based payment systems and switches with a cloud-native technology. The product is offered as a SaaS, liberating banks from running IT infrastructure and software upgrades. This is a first of its kind in the $300 billion banking IT industry. 6 of the top 10 private sector banks in India including HDFC Bank (the 14th largest bank in the world) have adopted Tachyon for various use cases, within 1 year of launch. Such adoption is never heard of in the banking industry. Tachyon is now launched in the USA as well. I have been associated with the Directi Group of companies for the past 11 years. I have led several tech initiatives in various capacities and have developed and managed the delivery of several scalable services. As the Tech Lead at Directi, I built multiple messaging services for the company. The most satisfying one being Flock, an enterprise and a real-time team messaging and collaboration platform that focussed on simplifying communication and boosting productivity. I also co-founded Bridle Information and Technology Solutions. Can you tell us what problems Zeta is trying to solve for? Traditionally, Financial Institutions (FIs) have worked with dozens of tech vendors to launch a single credit card program - with most vendors offering discrete pieces of functionality on tech stacks that are oftentimes older than the internet! These systems typically offer very slow release cycles and were never designed for the rapid pace of innovation that FIs have to contend with today. It also required banks to engage with complex integrations and multiple vendor partners resulting in slow moving and fractured program launches. Zeta is fundamentally changing this status quo. Our stack allows issuers to increase the lending book by composing contextual upsells using our extensive APIs and SDKs; reduce costs via pay-as-you-go SaaS billing; improve customer satisfaction by launching rich, self-serve experiences for card holders; and launch and iterate faster using our infinitely scalable cloud-native deployment Let's talk about the industry for a moment. What are the top trends you think will be game changing in the Fintech space? Embedded finance - finance has to become invisible and embedded across various activities that customers do. To meet the rising demand for embedded finance, financial institutions are increasingly offering banking as a service (BaaS)---bundled offerings, often white-labelled or cobranded services, that non-banks can use to serve their customers. Focus on resilience and quality - the goal is not to build the most agile and innovative system that exists, but also the one which is resilient. API is the product that your customers will see- Banking and fintech API leaders no longer view APIs simply as technical tools. Their ambitions extend even beyond monetizing APIs to using them to enable entirely new businesses through third parties and collaborations. For example, a bank may enter into an agreement with an insurer to offer an insurance product for small and medium-size businesses. So both banks and fintechs are using API interfaces that provide the best in class experience to their customers. Why do you think it's important to have an API first mindset when working with fintechs? As mentioned earlier, for fintechs, API is the product. Fintech wants the flexibility to build products and solve unique customer issues. They will typically buy a platform and build products on top of it to cater to their unique propositions. Therefore, effectively, API is their gateway to the platform capability as well as the only product they see - not the underlying platform. Do you see technical debt and backwards compatibility as a barrier for fintech progress? While these are the barriers, I believe the fundamental challenge is not trying to address the use cases from first principles. Both of these can be addressed if we start from the first principles. But, many a time, due to focus on speed to market and rapid product development, the attention is to solve the immediate issue rather than to build for the future. Technical debt arises because developers and product teams didn't plan for all use cases and scenarios, and backwards compatibility because we didn't truly understand the landscape. All of this can be solved by using first principle thinking. Getting to know you a little better, how would you describe your leadership approach? I have always believed in being passionate about what I do. I don't care if it is programming, algorithms, or operating systems. If you say you want to be good at something, how do you benchmark yourself? If you're passionate about it, how far are you willing to go? I believe that more than being passionate about a product, a leader should be passionate about a problem and how to solve it. What advice would you give to budding Fintech Entrepreneurs wishing to follow your path? My advice would be to create a product that should solve a problem and a techie or an entrepreneur should always invest in a problem. Be patient in your journey and always be passionate towards solving the problem. Finally, what does the future hold for Zeta? Zeta is expanding rapidly and has already onboarded multiple banks and fintechs to offer them its next-gen credit processing solution in North America. We aim to expand operations across UK, Europe and LATAM in the next 5 years Learn more about next-gen credit cards with Zeta.