Raka Khushu is an accomplished credit risk and fintech executive with more than 15 years of experience spanning consumer lending, underwriting, payments, pricing, portfolio management, product strategy, and advanced analytics. Throughout her career, she has built a reputation for translating complex data into practical business strategies that balance growth, customer affordability, disciplined risk selection, and sustainable economics. Her leadership sits at the intersection of credit, technology, product, and customer experience, enabling organizations to use risk management not simply as a control function, but as a strategic driver of responsible growth.
Raka currently serves as Head of Credit at PayZen, where she leads end to end credit strategy for a business generating more than multi million in annual originations. Her responsibilities span credit policy, underwriting, offer strategy, risk based pricing, portfolio monitoring, and risk mitigation. Working closely with Product, Finance, Engineering, Legal, Compliance, GTM, and Sales, she helps ensure that rapid business expansion remains aligned with customer affordability, portfolio quality, and positive unit economics.
Since joining PayZen, Raka has played an important role in enabling approximately two times year over year origination growth while maintaining positive unit economics. She has strengthened underwriting and offer strategies to improve decision quality and better match customers with products and repayment terms appropriate to their risk profiles and financial capacity. Her work demonstrates an ability to balance commercial opportunity with the disciplined credit practices necessary to build a resilient lending portfolio.
Technology and advanced analytics are also central to Raka’s leadership approach. At PayZen, she has led the deployment of foundational artificial intelligence and machine learning decisioning models that have improved conversion by approximately 20 percent while strengthening risk differentiation and decision quality. She has also advanced risk based pricing strategies across customer risk, product, and term dimensions, creating stronger alignment between portfolio economics and underlying credit exposure.
As PayZen expands its healthcare financing capabilities, Raka serves as a key credit leader in the development of new product lines. She integrates credit risk, affordability, profitability, and customer considerations into product design and go to market strategy, helping ensure that innovation is supported by sound economics. She has also built enhanced portfolio monitoring capabilities and early risk indicators, giving leadership greater visibility into emerging trends and enabling more proactive adjustments to underwriting, credit policy, and portfolio strategy.
Before joining PayZen, Raka served as Vice President at EXL Services, where she led cross functional and globally distributed teams of approximately 25 professionals. Her teams supported strategic initiatives across credit risk, digital analytics, deposit operations, and operational excellence for a leading U.S. credit card issuer. She directed both technical and nontechnical professionals in identifying business challenges, developing strategic roadmaps, prioritizing initiatives, and delivering measurable improvements across large and complex portfolios.
During her tenure at EXL, Raka led optimization of underwriting and line assignment strategies supporting acquisition and risk adjusted growth within a credit card portfolio exceeding $90 billion. She spearheaded a proof of concept for bank based underwriting capabilities designed to improve acquisition decisioning and led the development of automated anomaly detection capabilities across critical customer lifecycle processes. She also enhanced monitoring and control frameworks across payments, interest and fees, and collections, strengthening risk governance and audit readiness.
Raka additionally applied analytics to customer engagement and operational performance. She led early tenure engagement and loyalty strategies that increased spending by approximately 1.2 times while supporting retention and wallet share. Her ability to connect analytical insights with operational decisions also influenced banking operations staffing strategies by identifying high handle time customer call categories and opportunities to improve efficiency.
A significant portion of Raka’s career was built at American Express, where she spent approximately twelve years progressing through increasingly influential roles across digital and marketing analytics, pricing strategy, payments risk, financial underwriting, and early stage collections. Her tenure provided her with extensive exposure to the customer lifecycle and helped shape her holistic understanding of how credit decisions influence revenue, risk, engagement, compliance, and long term portfolio performance.
As Director of Risk Analytics for Early Stage Collections and Financial Underwriting, Raka led analysts and managers across multiple geographies and worked closely with business leaders, risk committees, technology teams, and operations. She developed targeted strategies for low tenure, high wallet customers that generated approximately $3 million in incremental revenue while balancing customer engagement with credit risk. She also enhanced financial underwriting frameworks to improve limit strategies, enable customer spending, and manage exposure more effectively.
Her work at American Express extended into digital transformation and customer experience. Raka piloted digital self service capabilities that accelerated customer resolution while producing approximately $5 million in operational cost savings. She analyzed new sources of data, including digital customer behavior, to strengthen early risk identification and developed risk treatment and experimentation strategies for higher risk segments. She also packaged process frameworks and analytical insights for internal audits and external regulators, supporting stronger governance and regulatory compliance.
As Director of Risk Analytics for Payments Risk, Raka led initiatives involving business partners, Technology, Compliance, Legal, Treasury, and external stakeholders. She guided the adoption of third party bank ownership verification and enhanced payment controls that reduced unauthorized ACH activity and merchant fraud by approximately $4 million annually. She also strengthened payment deferment strategies for higher risk ACH transactions, generating approximately $2 million in annual savings.
Her responsibilities included serving as a risk owner for AutoPay, where she helped drive feature enhancements, design improvements, customer disclosures, enrollment experiences, and ongoing communications. She evaluated real time payment capabilities and downturn preparedness while helping strengthen payment resilience and risk mitigation. Her leadership also included training teams and executives on NACHA rules and guidelines, reinforcing the connection between regulatory understanding, technology systems, and effective risk management.
Earlier at American Express, Raka served as Senior Manager of Risk Analytics for Pricing Strategy, where she helped advance risk based pricing for the U.S. consumer card business. She executed risk margin APR pricing strategies that generated approximately $3 million in additional finance charges and established a profitable promotional pricing framework that increased finance charge yield by more than 20 percent while generating more than $2 million in incremental revenue. She also improved regulatory lookback processes to strengthen alignment with pricing strategies and reduce UDAAP exposure.
Raka’s earlier experience with American Express India further established her analytical foundation. As Manager of Digital and Marketing Analytics, she led product, incentive sequencing, acquisition, attribution, search, and direct mail analytics across international markets. Among her contributions was the development of a company first geotargeting and audience profiling framework that improved acquisition return on investment by approximately 30 percent. She began her professional career as a Credit and Marketing Analyst with EXL Services, establishing the quantitative and customer focused foundation that would support her progression into senior leadership.
Raka holds a Master of Science in Statistics from the Department of Statistics at the University of Delhi and a Bachelor of Science Honors degree in Statistics from Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. Her academic training in statistics remains evident in her disciplined approach to decision making, experimentation, modeling, portfolio analysis, and risk management. At the same time, her career progression demonstrates an ability to move beyond analytics alone and translate quantitative insights into decisions that executives, product teams, engineers, and business leaders can act upon.
Across her career, Raka has demonstrated that effective credit leadership requires more than managing downside risk. She views credit as an enterprise capability that can inform product design, pricing, customer experience, portfolio economics, and sustainable growth. Her experience managing portfolios and strategies at significant scale, combined with her understanding of AI and machine learning, regulatory considerations, customer behavior, and cross functional execution, gives her a broad perspective on the opportunities and challenges facing modern financial services organizations.
For boards, executive teams, and growth oriented organizations, Raka brings a combination of analytical rigor, commercial judgment, technological fluency, and practical operating experience. She understands how to evaluate growth opportunities through the lenses of risk adjusted economics, customer affordability, portfolio resilience, and long term value creation. Her ability to connect credit, product, pricing, analytics, technology, and customer strategy positions her as a thoughtful leader capable of contributing to complex decisions involving innovation, growth, governance, and risk.
Character Raka leads with integrity, accountability, curiosity, and disciplined judgment, approaching complex decisions with an appreciation for both business objectives and responsible customer outcomes. Her leadership reflects a commitment to building sustainable solutions rather than pursuing growth at the expense of sound risk management.
Knowledge Raka brings deep expertise across credit risk, consumer lending, fintech, underwriting, payments, pricing, portfolio strategy, regulatory considerations, AI and machine learning, and advanced analytics. Her quantitative foundation, combined with more than 15 years of operating experience, enables her to evaluate complex portfolios and business challenges from both analytical and commercial perspectives.
Strategic Raka connects risk, product, pricing, technology, customer behavior, and economics to develop strategies capable of scaling with the business. Her record of improving conversion, enabling portfolio growth, generating incremental revenue, reducing losses and costs, and strengthening risk controls demonstrates her ability to translate data into measurable business impact.
Communication Raka has developed the ability to make sophisticated credit and analytical concepts understandable, actionable, and relevant to diverse stakeholders. Her experience leading global teams and partnering across Product, Finance, Engineering, Legal, Compliance, Technology, Operations, Sales, and executive leadership allows her to build alignment around complex decisions and move strategies from analysis into execution.
