SARATH BABU M · SENIOR PRODUCT MARKETER · BENGALURU
Engineer → Product Manager → Product Marketer
I've spent 7+ years building and taking B2B technology products to market, with nearly five years in banking and fintech. Today I lead product marketing at OPEN across connected banking, fintech APIs and banking infrastructure.
I've worked across three layers of banking technology — from the systems banks run on to the products businesses use and the infrastructure now being built for banks.
Built billing modules for banks, including Standard Bank of Africa, at SunTec, a banking billing and revenue-management company. It was my first look at how much of banking sits below the product a customer sees.
Worked on corporate internet banking for two large Indian banks and took API banking products to market. I also wrote OPEN's API Banking Primer, which became the company's top organic traffic driver.
Lead product marketing for connected banking and OPEN's AI-native banking platform, sold to banks and enterprise finance teams.
Each one links to the full story below.
Enterprise positioning · Channel strategy · ₹2Cr ARR
The product had outgrown its story. OPEN Money was known as a neobank for small businesses, while connected banking had a stronger enterprise use case. I repositioned it for CFOs and enterprise finance teams. The business now has ₹2Cr ARR from four enterprise anchors.
→ Case 1Onboarding · Conversion · 200+ merchants · ₹420Cr peak monthly GMV
Merchants were dropping before onboarding really began. OPEN's payment gateway was losing merchants at KYC — the identity and risk checks required during onboarding. I moved those checks later in the journey and digitised document validation. Conversion increased 15%; the gateway grew to 200+ merchants and ₹420Cr in peak monthly GMV.
→ Case 2Pricing & packaging · 95% paid conversion · ₹30L ARR
A free product needed to start charging. Optotax, a tax platform for chartered accountants, had been free for five years. I co-owned the packaging and migration with product. 95% of active users converted, churn stayed below 5%, ₹30L ARR was added, and around 30% of accounts later moved from monthly to annual plans.
→ Case 3ICP discovery · Vertical GTM · ₹6Cr pipeline
We didn't know the ICP. OPEN's accounts-payable automation product launched without a clear ideal customer. I used ads to test industries, narrowed the focus to manufacturing, automotive and food & beverage, and built a separate GTM for each. That produced 10 enterprise clients and ₹6Cr in pipeline.
→ Case 4I'm rebuilding parts of marketing and sales around AI and automation — from how we research and create content to how leads are sourced, enriched, routed and fed back into the sales process.
An expense tracker that reads transaction SMS messages and turns them into a spending view without manual entry.
Research, drafting, fact-checking and evaluation in one pipeline. Used by OPEN's marketing team; blog production time fell from 4–5 hours to 1–1.5 hours.
I write about banking infrastructure and fintech.
A long-form guide to API banking that I originally wrote for OPEN. It became one of the company's strongest organic traffic drivers. The current version is published under a team member's byline.
Read the primer →Learned to use the Octalysis framework to think about user motivation, behavioural drivers and product engagement beyond simple points and rewards.
View credential — Actionable Gamification (opens in a new tab)Strengthened how I connect product vision to strategy, prioritisation and the metrics used to judge whether the product is moving in the right direction.
View credential — Advanced Vision, Product Strategy & Metrics (opens in a new tab)Learned how product experience, onboarding, activation and usage signals can drive acquisition, adoption and expansion.
View credential — Product-led Certification (opens in a new tab)Covered the fundamentals of product discovery, prioritisation, requirements, roadmap decisions and working across product, engineering and business teams.
View credential — Product Management Certification (opens in a new tab)An intensive product management program covering product discovery, strategy, prioritisation, metrics and execution, with mentoring from experienced product leaders.
View credential — Upraised Certification in Product Management (opens in a new tab)I started as a software engineer at SunTec, building billing modules for banks including Standard Bank of Africa. I later joined OPEN as its third marketing hire at Series A, where I worked on corporate internet banking, API banking and Zwitch, and wrote the API Banking Primer that became OPEN's top organic traffic driver.
Between my two stints at OPEN, I worked across B2B marketing and product. At Regalix, my pre-sales work helped close $700K in deals with Wipro and EdgeVerve. At Tan90, as the founding product manager, I helped scale a STEM product to 228 schools across 15+ states. In London, at NISA, I sold a 15M-follower Instagram page to tech brands including Hinge and InVideo.
I'm now back at OPEN as a Senior Product Marketing Manager, working across connected banking, fintech APIs and banking infrastructure.
I'm most useful when the product is technically complex, the buyer is hard to reach, and the GTM needs more than a new campaign.
MBA, IIM Rohtak · B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering, Government Engineering College Thrissur
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