When Yogesh Jadhav joined Choice International nearly 13 years ago, the organisation was best known for its equity broking business and was still testing the waters in adjacent financial services. Today, the group operates across equities, insurance, NBFC, government projects and asset management, with technology emerging as a central growth driver rather than a back-office function.
“I’ve been with the group for almost 12–13 years,” says Jadhav, Group CTO, Choice International & Choice Techlab. “When we started, Choice was primarily into equity broking and was exploring other services. It was a phase of experimentation, but over time we realised that we had built a very strong in-house tech team.”
That realisation was shaped by early leadership conviction. “Our Group MD, Kamal sir, believed very early that technology would become core to the business. This was even before COVID. He wanted a strong in-house team rather than complete vendor dependency,” Jadhav says.
The initial focus was on taking core financial services online. “The primary goal was to get mutual funds and equity platforms online so clients could access them from their devices,” he notes. What followed, especially post-COVID, was a rapid acceleration in digital demand, something the group was already structurally prepared for.
Yet, as Choice expanded into insurance, government services and newer verticals, Jadhav’s role evolved beyond delivering platforms. “It’s not just about building tech,” he explains. “It’s about understanding the domain, understanding the value technology can bring, and delivering on that value, not just the technology piece.”
Technology as a business partner, not a service provider
Unlike conglomerates where IT functions operate separately, Choice’s technology team is embedded deeply within business operations. “We’re not an independent technology unit,” Jadhav says. “It’s not a case where business gives a requirement, we deliver it and move on. We are a core part of Choice.”
That embedded model comes with joint accountability. “We’re responsible for ensuring adoption, defining success metrics and making sure the system actually delivers value,” he adds. This thinking shaped how the team approached not just end customers but also Choice’s vast B2B and partner ecosystem.
“Initially, we were focused only on clients,” Jadhav says. “But we realised we also have a large B2B and B2B2C network. Whatever we built for customers also had to empower partners. The services were similar, but the approach was different. The success parameter was the same, adoption and value creation.”
One of the biggest internal challenges was a mindset shift. “Developers are trained to think … give me a requirement, I’ll build it,” Jadhav reflects. “Once it goes live without bugs, the job is done. But as we scaled, that wasn’t enough.”
The focus had to move from feature delivery to outcome-driven products. “It’s not just about building a login system,” he says. “It’s about measuring login success rates, understanding drop-offs and improving customer experience continuously.”
The same applied to business teams. “Earlier, conversations were very feature-specific, a button here, a screen there,” Jadhav explains. “We had to change that to what problem are you actually facing, and what value do you want to achieve? Once both sides align on KRAs, for example, faster account creation with fewer errors, the solution can involve changes in operations, technology or both.”
Tackling legacy through integration, not disruption
Operating across financial services inevitably means dealing with legacy systems. “In insurance, some back-office platforms were industry standard but extremely legacy,” Jadhav says. “Everything revolved around uploading and downloading files. There were no APIs, no real-time sync.”
In such cases, Choice had no option but to rebuild. “Some systems were so rigid that we had to replace them with completely new in-house platforms,” he says. Elsewhere, the team chose a more pragmatic route. “In equity back-office systems, vendors didn’t have APIs but gave us database access. We built our own APIs on top of that to fetch and push data in real time.”
The rule, Jadhav emphasises, is simple, “Don’t build unless it’s really necessary. If something exists in the market and works, we adapt it.”
This approach culminated in one of Choice’s most strategic internal platforms, a unified interface called Connect.
“We built a single UI system called Connect,” he explains. “Employees, operations teams, HR, finance, branches and even partners access all services through one system, one login. Equity, insurance, government services, everything.”
Behind the simplicity is heavy integration work. “Almost 90% of our core tech team’s time goes into building middleware between systems,” Jadhav says. “Because many of these are legacy platforms, someone has to bridge the gaps and make them talk to each other.”
This unified platform has drawn interest externally as well. “Other organisations have approached our teams to replicate this model because the ecosystem is so fragmented,” he adds.
Hybrid cloud and value-led AI adoption
Choice runs a hybrid infrastructure designed around compliance and scalability. “For the last five years, we’ve operated a hybrid model,” affirms Jadhav. “Compliance-critical components run in our own data centre, while auto-scaling workloads are on AWS.”
AI adoption follows a similar disciplined path. “We don’t roll out AI across the organisation blindly,” he explains. “We pick one department in one vertical, define success criteria, run POCs for three months and only then decide on scaling.”
One early focus area was internal software development. “As we scaled from 30 to 250 people, maintaining quality and consistency became a challenge,” Jadhav says. “AI is very effective at code reviews.”
The impact was measurable. “We’ve seen a 30–35% reduction in deployment time, across review, testing and release stages,” he points out. Coding productivity has improved by about 20–25%, with a target of reaching 40% as models get better trained on Choice’s coding practices.
Operational teams are also using AI, particularly for government tenders. “Tender evaluation is very manual and error-prone,” Jadhav notes. “AI helps with initial shortlisting based on criteria, with a human in the loop. The benefit so far is around 15–20%, but we expect this to improve as workflows mature.”
Choice follows a hybrid AI model, a 10-member internal team for core use cases, supported by specialised vendors in areas like AI chatbots and security platforms.
Security by design in a high-risk landscape
With rapid digital expansion comes growing cyber risk. “Today, the first question we ask before building anything is if do we really need it or not?” Jadhav says. “Every new system increases the attack surface.”
To address this, Choice strengthened its in-house security capabilities. “Relying only on vendors isn’t enough anymore,” he says. “Security has to work closely with day-to-day operations.”
Security is now embedded into development itself. “We follow security by design, and security is part of developers’ KPIs,” Jadhav explains. “It’s not a separate team’s responsibility. Developers are trained on attack vectors, secure coding and data protection.”
The group also applies the strictest regulatory standards across all businesses. “We take RBI and SEBI requirements and apply them across the organisation,” he says. “Even where regulations are lighter, we operate at the highest bar to stay future-ready.”
Making upskilling non-negotiable
For Jadhav, building a future-ready workforce is a CEO and CTO level priority. “Many team members have been with us for eight to ten years,” he says. “The challenge is keeping them relevant as technology keeps changing.”
Choice moved away from optional learning. “Paying for courses didn’t work,” he admits. “Now, learning is part of core KRAs.”
The team follows a structured cycle. “Every two months, we conduct focused training and brainstorming sessions, followed by application cycles and weekly reviews,” Jadhav says. “It’s training, application, feedback, continuously.”
Measuring impact in adoption and scale
The results are visible across businesses. “In equity, before COVID, 70% of transactions were offline,” Jadhav says. “Post-COVID, it flipped to digital, and today we’re at nearly a 90–10 split. Almost 95% of trades now happen on our platform.”
Insurance has seen similar gains. “Digital policy issuance moved from around 30% to nearly 60%,” he notes. “That has allowed us to scale without growing teams proportionately.”
Looking back, Jadhav believes the real innovation lies in a consistent philosophy. “If you design systems only for technical convenience, they may be secure and easy to manage, but they won’t add much value,” he concludes. “When you align technology with business outcomes, you’re forced to solve harder problems. It takes time, but the impact is very real.”