Launching India's Interim Onboarding Risk Model
Prioritized a market-specific risk model for a strategically important India launch.
- Market launch
- Heuristic model
- Risk controls
- Prioritization
- India
Saurav Mahapatra
Lead Product Manager at Tide
From their time as
Senior Product Manager
Tide • 2023 - 2026
Overview
Saurav needed a market-specific onboarding risk decision for Tide's India launch. He showed that reusing the UK ML model produced poor results, secured priority for a heuristic model, and compressed the delivery timeline.
The Story
Saurav was preparing risk controls for an India launch built around a basic wallet offering. The market needed an onboarding risk score, but engineering preferred to reuse the UK machine learning model because a new provider would later take over KYC risk.
He tested the UK model against India and found that its results were not reliable for the new market. Different data, customer behavior, and fraud patterns required a local solution.
Saurav made the case for a focused heuristic model using the available fraud data and market-specific risk factors. He framed the work as a strategic launch requirement tied to active-user growth, even though it would later be replaced.
Engineering had competing UK work. Saurav worked with engineering and data science to reduce scope, compress the build and back-testing plan, and accept a trade-off elsewhere in the roadmap.
Ownership Snapshot
Broad role
Product manager for market-specific onboarding risk.
Goal
Provide a compliant risk decision for an India wallet launch.
Direct ownership
Made the prioritization case and reduced the build scope and timeline.
Team execution
Aligned engineering and data science around a short-lived but necessary model.