Success Stories

Rathi Murthy: The CTO Making Responsible AI Work at Varo Bank

R
Redaction 08 novembre 2026
Rathi Murthy: The CTO Making Responsible AI Work at Varo Bank

Rathi Murthy is the Chief Technology Officer of Varo Bank, the first nationally chartered, all-digital consumer bank in the United States. She took the role in 2025 after leading technology at Expedia Group, Verizon Media and Gap Inc., and in just over two years she has turned responsible artificial intelligence into the backbone of Varo's engineering culture. Her career matters to women in technology for a simple reason: she has reached a level that most women never reach. Only 7% of the most senior engineering leaders — CTO, EVP and SVP roles — are women or nonbinary people, according to the 2025 State of Women in Engineering Leadership study. Murthy is part of that 7%, and she talks openly about how she got there.

Table of Contents

From Bangalore to the C-Suite

Rathi Murthy started fixing machines before she had any formal training in them. Growing up in Bangalore, she was about ten years old when the family table fan stopped working on a sweltering afternoon; she took it apart with a screwdriver set her father had given her, and when the repair failed, he sat on the floor with her and they traced the fault together. That story, which she still tells in interviews, is the origin of a career built on curiosity rather than permission. She went on to earn a Master's degree in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University and joined the early web through a startup role at WebMD, where she learned that a good product can still fail if the market is not ready for it.

From there the résumé reads like a map of the consumer internet: senior roles at Sun Microsystems, eBay, Yahoo and WebMD, then Chief Information Officer of Enterprise Growth at American Express, where she ran the Serve platform and prepaid products such as Bluebird. She was Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Gap Inc., building the digital roadmap for its brand portfolio, and later Chief Technology Officer at Verizon Media, leading platform technology and early 5G innovation.

The recognition followed: WomenTech Network named her one of the Top 100 Executive Women in Tech to Watch in 2023, after honours as a Top Woman in Cloud Innovation in 2014 and one of the Most Influential Women in Payments in 2015. Outside the corporate world she sits on the board of PagerDuty — a director since March 2019, according to the company's 2026 proxy statement — and teaches Art of Living courses in mindfulness.

The Expedia Years: AI at 600 Billion Predictions

Murthy's proving ground was Expedia Group, where she served as President and Chief Technology Officer of Expedia Services from June 2021 to May 2024. Her mandate was to turn 21 separate brands — Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Travelocity and more — into one platform, and to use artificial intelligence to make that platform feel personal rather than mechanical.

The scale is difficult to overstate. Expedia Group's travel platform processes more than 600 billion AI predictions each year, powering fraud prevention, customer service, price comparison and booking. During the pandemic, when call volumes hit five times normal levels and the company handled more than 500,000 calls a day, her team accelerated its conversational platform: Expedia now handles over 29 million conversations through virtual agents, saving more than 8 million hours of agent time and keeping average call time under 30 seconds. Expedia was also an early adopter of OpenAI's ChatGPT plugins, building models on top of existing systems so that security and governance came first. "Technology is not built for the sake of technology. Technology has to have a purpose," she later told Banking Dive — a sentence that summarises her whole approach.

Why Varo Bank Recruited Her

Varo Bank hired Murthy in 2025 to run technology at a very particular kind of company. Varo is not a fintech wrapper around someone else's bank: the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted Varo a de novo national bank charter in July 2020, making it the first consumer fintech in the United States to hold its own charter, so customer deposits are FDIC-insured up to $250,000 directly rather than through a partner bank. CEO Gavin Michael announced her appointment by saying that her "deep knowledge and impressive track record of digital transformation and implementing industry-leading AI make her the ideal technology leader to move Varo forward." Murthy's answer was about mission: "Varo is using technological innovation to ensure everyone is able to build financial resilience."

The timing was demanding. Varo has lost money every year since it opened as a bank in August 2020 — $91.8 million in 2025 and $46.6 million in the first half of 2026 — and on-balance-sheet deposits fell from $379 million in March 2024 to $210 million in June 2026, although the bank reported that a further $150 million of customer money was swept to other banks at the end of 2025. Investors have kept the bank funded: it raised $123.9 million in a Series G round in February 2026 led by Warburg Pincus and Coliseum Capital, and its Tier 1 leverage ratio stood at 18.5% in June 2026 against a 9% community-bank threshold. In July 2026 it added JPMorgan Chase veteran Sean Kelley as Chief Financial Officer, part of a year of senior hires across technology, AI and operations. Murthy's job is to make the technology side of that story scale without adding cost or risk.

Responsible AI With Guardrails

Murthy's argument is that responsible AI is not a compliance tax but a competitive advantage, and she has written the playbook in public. "AI can only be as trustworthy as the architecture an organization builds around it," she argues in The Financial Brand, urging leaders to think deliberately about the truth and context of their data, what a system is optimising for, how much authority it should hold, and who owns the outcome. Her timing is not accidental: Deloitte's 2026 Global Human Capital Trends research found that 60% of executives now regularly use AI to support their decisions — delegating judgement without a shared standard for how far to go.

Two of her formulations are worth quoting because they change how a reader hears the word "AI". First: "Generative AI is probabilistic, and a confident tone is not the same thing as a correct answer." Second: the objective given to an AI system is a values statement, whether leaders treat it that way or not. She frames the choice with three human-centered questions — does this elevate human potential, does it prevent harm, does it preserve human agency — and she grounds them in lived experience. Working earlier in her career on financial products for underbanked customers, she saw what a false decline actually costs: "a false decline could mean rent or groceries."

Her operating model is deliberately gradual. Systems start in shadow mode, producing recommendations that are compared against real outcomes while the customer stays unaffected. Then comes a limited pilot with narrow thresholds and reversible decisions. Authority expands only after accuracy, consistency, bias and real-world impact have been evaluated. The alternative, she warns, is "the silent surrender of human decision-making," where an employee clicking approve inside a service-level target holds authority on paper and exercises almost no judgment in practice.

Building the Team and the Architecture

Murthy does not treat culture as something that happens after the roadmap. Within months of joining Varo she identified two missing roles — a chief architect responsible for an architecture that stays scalable and secure, and an executive for engineering strategy and operations — and hired FS Nooruddin and Payal Carpenter into them, both executives who had worked with her at American Express, Gap and Yahoo. She also established an architecture guild so that new tools are reviewed rather than adopted on enthusiasm alone. "We just need to keep feeding the engine and maturing the engine as we go," she told The Financial Technology Report.

The substance of that engine is concrete. Varo uses data and AI for underwriting, fraud detection and risk compliance, and for personalisation across the customer journey, while an internal decision-making platform called Supernova supports the bank's analytical work. Her summary of the strategy is short: "Data and AI is our secret sauce." It pairs that with partnerships such as Visa and with the discipline of a regulated institution: Varo does not rush into new technology unless it delivers meaningful impact for customers.

What Her Story Means for Women in Technology

Murthy's ascent is still statistically unusual. Women hold just 20.2% of Chief Technology Officer positions in mid-market technology firms, compared with 45.3% of Human Resources Director positions, according to Grant Thornton's 2024 Women in Business data. The picture in AI is narrower still: women hold only 22–26% of AI-specific roles and just 8–9% of CTO and CIO positions, per the Tech Ladies 2025 Women in AI Report. When women do reach the top, they are often the only one in the room — which is exactly why Murthy's advice to the next generation is so direct.

Her guidance is practical rather than inspirational. In interviews she tells young women to know that they belong even when they are the only woman present, not to wait until they feel like an expert before speaking, and to lead in their own style instead of imitating a template. She is equally blunt about the stakes of absence: if women are not part of shaping AI models, she argues, systemic bias can be amplified rather than corrected. That is a technical claim as much as a moral one, and it explains why she pushes for women in the rooms where authority over AI is granted. Readers who want the surrounding playbook can start with 5 Leadership Lessons Every Woman Executive Should Embrace, Strategies for Shattering the Glass Ceiling and Leadership Wisdom: 06 Lessons from Trailblazing Women Executives.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Rathi Murthy?

Rathi Murthy is the Chief Technology Officer of Varo Bank, the first nationally chartered, all-digital consumer bank in the United States. She is a technology executive with more than 25 years of experience across Expedia Group, Verizon Media, Gap Inc., American Express, eBay and Yahoo, and she also serves on the board of PagerDuty.

What does Rathi Murthy do at Varo Bank?

She leads Varo's end-to-end technology strategy: the design and development of secure, scalable and AI-powered banking platforms, the architecture that keeps them safe, and the engineering organisation that ships them. Her teams apply AI to underwriting, fraud detection, risk compliance and customer personalisation.

How long did she lead technology at Expedia Group?

She was President and Chief Technology Officer of Expedia Services from June 2021 to May 2024, a period in which the group unified 21 brands onto a single platform and scaled AI systems processing more than 600 billion predictions a year.

Why does she call responsible AI a differentiator?

Because trust is the product in banking. Her position is that AI is only as trustworthy as the architecture around it: governed data, a clear objective, explicit authority, human agency and traceable outcomes. Banks that build those conditions can use AI aggressively without exposing customers, regulators or the business to surprises.

Is Varo Bank a real, regulated bank?

Yes. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted Varo a de novo national bank charter in July 2020, the first for a consumer fintech in the United States. Deposits are FDIC-insured up to $250,000 per depositor, held directly by Varo Bank, N.A. rather than through a partner institution.

What advice does she give to women in technology?

Three things: know that you belong even when you are the only woman in the room, do not wait until you feel like an expert before contributing, and lead in your own style. She also warns that AI models shaped only by one demographic can amplify bias, so women should claim influence over both the technology and the values behind it.

Conclusion

Rathi Murthy's career shows what a woman can do with a long runway and a clear principle: technology has to have a purpose. From a Bangalore living room to Santa Clara University, from Gap and Verizon to an Expedia platform making 600 billion predictions a year, she has consistently chosen roles where scale and human consequence meet. At Varo Bank she is doing her most consequential work yet — building AI systems that a regulator, a customer and a board can all defend, inside a bank that must turn technology into a path to profitability. For women entering engineering leadership, the lesson is that the 7% at the top are reachable — through competence, architecture and a stubborn insistence on keeping people in charge of the machines.

Sources

Rathi Murthy
R

Redaction

Auteur chez Women Entrepreneurs