# Rishi Athanikar

New York, NY | rishi@rishiathanikar.com | linkedin.com/in/rishiathanikar | rishiathanikar.com

## SUMMARY

Product leader with 10+ years building B2B SaaS, consumer and AI products in banking, payments, HR tech and insurance. At Rho, launched Lead Bank as a second partner bank and defined the AI-agent strategy behind Rho's public API and MCP server. Previously built ML underwriting and compliance automation at Justworks and led consumer banking experience and BaaS migration at Stash.

## EXPERIENCE

### Senior Product Manager | Rho | New York, NY | Jan 2026 - Present

Lead banking and API for a business banking platform serving venture-backed startups

- Launched Lead Bank as Rho's second partner bank in 2.5 months, with domestic and international payments, opening Rho to high-risk industries like crypto and defense tech and to non-US founders.
- Defined Rho's AI-agent strategy and delivered its data foundation: a unified transaction service, migrated with 100% reconciliation, powering Home, Transactions and the public API.
- Led Rho's public API, MCP server and Slack agent. Hundreds of businesses use the MCP server each week to work with their Rho data in Claude. Now adding agent-initiated payments with human approval.
- Partnered with GTM on technical sales calls with founders, demoing Rho's API and MCP server and walking through the API roadmap.
- Launched a unified financial overview on Home showing cash position, cash flow and card spend, replacing fragmented views, for all customers.
- Shipped agent experiences, AI-enabled internal tools and Slack apps that let CS enroll customers in betas and turn on features without waiting on product or engineering.

### Senior Product Manager | Justworks | New York, NY | May 2023 - Dec 2025

- Led an ML underwriting model with human review of edge cases, reaching 92% accuracy, cutting manual underwriting work by 85%, and enabling risk-based pricing.
- Spread risk across multiple regulated entities with Persona KYB verification and automated customer assignment rules, increasing risk-adjusted margin by 8%.
- Automated regulatory responses across 50 states from structured data, reaching a >99% compliance rate and cutting operations work by 90%.
- Rebuilt unemployment insurance tax and premium infrastructure for accurate rate calculation and risk-based pricing, unlocking $5M in new revenue.
- Separated tax remittance from premium revenue in the NetSuite general ledger, ending manual reconciliation and saving Finance 20 hours at each quarter-end close.
- Led AI adoption in product, including prototyping with Claude Code and launching justworks.com/llms.txt.

### Lead Product Manager, Consumer Banking | Stash | New York, NY | Jul 2021 - Apr 2023

- Migrated 100% of eligible accounts (92% of the base; the rest were dormant or closed) from a legacy BaaS provider to Stash's own banking platform with zero service disruption.
- Shipped a Reg E compliant in-app dispute flow connected to operations case management, cutting dispute calls by 60% and resolution time from 14 days to 3.
- Launched direct deposit switching with Atomic, increasing monthly platform deposits by 7% and cutting related support contacts by 95%. Owned the Plaid bank-linking integration.
- Redesigned onboarding and first funding, raising conversion by 14% and average first deposit by 150%.

### Senior Product Manager, Retail & Digital Experience | Casper | New York, NY | Oct 2019 - Jun 2021

- Rolled out a custom Adyen point-of-sale system to 72 stores, adopted by 450+ employees in one week.
- Added Affirm financing to in-store checkout, generating $4M in incremental retail revenue in 2020.
- Led Casper's first connected sleep device through beta, across hardware, firmware and the app.

### Product Manager, E-commerce & Mobile | Peet's Coffee | San Francisco, CA | Jul 2017 - Sep 2019

- Launched iOS and Android loyalty apps from scratch, reaching 300K monthly active users and $20M in mobile payment volume in the first 3 months.
- Redesigned peets.com, improving purchase conversion by 12% and subscription sign-ups by 10%, and beating the annual revenue target by $800K.
- Moved 1.5M customer accounts to a single login across web and mobile with an enterprise identity platform.

### Technical Cofounder | Beander | Seattle, WA | 2014 - 2016

- Built a two-sided marketplace connecting 3 US green coffee importers with 100+ small-batch roasters.
- Gave roasters access to 150+ varietals from 15 countries; bootstrapped to profitability and exited in 2016.

### Associate to Technical Product Analyst | Wunderman Thompson | Seattle, WA | 2011 - 2017

- Led launch work for Microsoft's HoloLens campaign and SDK sign-up, and shipped Xbox.com features.
- Redesigned BECU's digital banking site within financial services regulatory and accessibility requirements.
- Built CMS infrastructure and multi-market rollouts for AT&T, and P&G's first brand Facebook page.

## SKILLS

- **Domains:** Business banking, payments, partner bank integrations, KYB/KYC, Reg E, underwriting, compliance automation, public APIs, MCP
- **Tools:** SQL, Amplitude, Looker, Mixpanel, Claude Code, Cursor

## EDUCATION

### Master's, Information Systems | University of Cincinnati, Lindner College of Business | 2009 - 2011

### Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Science | University of Mumbai | 2005 - 2009