Aiaz Kazi is on a new mission. It's currently stealth.

He was recently the Chief Platform Officer of Santander. Kazi's role supported the bank’s transformation to become an open platform for financial services, reporting directly to Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Lindsey Argalas.  Kazi was responsible for helping the bank evolve the way it delivered products and services to its customers. Santander’s open and collaborative technology strategy was a crucial part of its digital transformation to better meet needs of its 144 million customers.

Kazi led the open platform for financial services working with Santander’s global technology division and teams across the bank’s 10 core markets in Europe and the Americas. Santander was already transforming its front-office, so that all product and services are available in digital channels, and its back-office: re-engineering, digitizing and automatizing all processes. Given the bank’s scale and extensive customer and partner base, the bank viewed evolving into an open global platform as the natural next step.

Kazi was previously head of Platform Ecosystem for Google Cloud, following a long stint at SAP, where he launched, shaped and helped grow SAP HANA to become one of the most successful enterprise platforms. He brings a wealth of experience to the bank in developing cloud platforms, growing developer and partner ecosystems, and driving platform adoption, to the benefit of both customers and technology partners.

Aiaz is based in San Francisco with a global remit. He has an MBA from the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Bombay, India. Kazi is the latest in a string of senior hires from Amazon, Google, Facebook, PayPal and Intuit, complementing bank-experienced entrepreneurial talent from Santander’s local markets.