Ruchika Panesar is Vice President, CTO & Global Consumer Services Group, Head of Technology, Asia Pacific at American Express. Ruchika is also Director on the American Express India Pvt Ltd and American Express Banking Corporation company Boards and member of the India Leadership Team.

Ruchika is a deep Technologist and an inspiring Global Digital leader. With over 2 decades of experience in Product and Platform architecture and Engineering, she leads her Global teams to grow in their contributions, engineering muscle and innovations.

As part of her global role, Ruchika leads an engineering team across several locations responsible for Enterprise Communications and Conversational Intelligence. She is responsible for building products and platforms for the company that engage and delight our customers across the communication touch points and digital experiences in their membership journey. She is also responsible for research, development and engineering in partnership with Amex Labs. These capabilities are critical to backing American Express’s strong customer first approach. Ruchika’s Asia Pacific team is responsible for partnering with the region propreitary businesses and the American Express China JV to build best in class technology solutions along the Payments landscape and regulatory value chain and to provide technical intelligence and innovation.

One of her milestone roles, was Chief of Staff to the company’s Global CIO, where she was an integral part of the Global Technology Leadership Team based out of New York. As part of the role, she contributed to a range of strategic initiatives, including the company’s Global Technology Strategy, operating model, and numerous other critical strategies. In her prior roles, Ruchika has led innovation in launching products and platforms across the customer lifecycle, as well as led disruptive tech COEs in the Big Data Analytics, Machine Learning and Automation space.

Being a purpose driven leader, she passionately leads several causes that matter. As the leader of the Amex India’s Flagship Inclusion & Diversity program, she champions the vision.

She has been instrumental in expanding the program beyond Gender and include critically important pillars like Generations, LGBTQ and Differently Abled & Mental Health, thereby bringing in a true and holistic culture of Inclusion & Diversity. She is passionate about STEM education and is an active voice for ‘Women In Technology’ networks both inside and outside of American Express.

Ruchika’s rich experience and passion for Engineering & People fuels her mantra to be inspiringly ambitious for herself and others in the organization as she relentlessly coaches, motivates and empowers her family she calls – Team Amex!