MAM
Bankersklub hires Gaurav Kathuria to lead marketing and partnerships in growth-hungry fintech blitz
MUMBAI: In the mad scramble for fintech dominance, where buzzwords fly faster than balance sheets, Bankersklub has just made a power move. The corporate finance aggregator – already making waves by blending old-school banking smarts with new-age startup hustle – has roped in Gaurav Kathuria as its head of marketing & partnerships. It’s the kind of appointment that says, “We’re not just playing to survive – we’re scaling to dominate.”
Kathuria’s appointment is a key piece in Bankersklub’s playbook to build a sustainable, scalable fintech brand that’s not afraid to speak the language of VCs, IPOs and big-ticket clients. And with over 20 years of experience across marketing, growth, and digital transformation – including stints at The Times of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Visa Inc., and Home Credit – Kathuria isn’t here to faff around.
In his new role, he’ll lead everything from partnerships and integrated campaigns to performance marketing, content creation and automation. Basically, he’ll be the man behind the fintech curtain, pulling levers that drive brand visibility and lead generation while the rest of us wonder how they suddenly appeared on every timeline and podcast.
Welcoming him on board, Bankersklub founder & CEO Rajat Chopra stated, “We are excited to welcome Gaurav as our head of marketing & partnerships. His demonstrated success in brand development, client engagement, and strategic partnerships aligns perfectly with our vision for Bankersklub’s growth. Gaurav’s leadership and expertise will help us scale successful marketing and relationship-building strategies. We are confident that by cultivating high-impact partnerships and optimizing marketing efforts, Gaurav’s leadership will play a key role in propelling Bankersklub to new heights in a competitive marketplace.”
True to fintech form, this isn’t just about making noise – it’s about making it measurable.
And Kathuria gets that.
“I am excited to join Bankersklub and contribute to its mission of facilitating strategic investment opportunities for high-growth companies. My goal is to leverage data-driven marketing strategies and optimize performance across digital and offline channels to enhance brand visibility and customer engagement. By forging strategic partnerships and alliances, I aim to position Bankersklub as a trusted platform for Pre-IPO, IPO, and Growth Capital stage companies. I look forward to driving scalable and sustainable growth by aligning marketing initiatives with business objectives and delivering measurable outcomes,” said Kathuria.
Armed with Martech know-how, automation wizardry, and a knack for demand generation, Kathuria’s reputation for turning campaign dashboards into deal flow could be the secret sauce Bankersklub needs to keep climbing the fintech food chain.
AD Agencies
Amazon Ads launches AI tools to build and run campaigns in India
Two new agentic tools promise to slash the time and cost of building and running ad campaigns in India
MUMBAI Amazon Ads has thrown two agentic AI tools into the Indian market – Creative Agent and Ads Agent – and the pitch is blunt: do in hours what once took weeks, at no extra cost, and leave rivals eating algorithmic dust. The e-commerce giant is determined to democratise sophisticated advertising, handing small businesses the same firepower that until now only the biggest brands could afford.
Creative Agent, embedded within Amazon’s Creative Studio, works as a conversational AI creative partner. Click “chat” and it springs to life: researching products and audiences, brainstorming concepts, drafting multi-scene video scripts, generating images, animating scenes, laying in voiceovers and music, and spitting out finished display and video ads. The entire pipeline – from blank page to broadcast-ready creative – runs on Amazon’s own first-party signals, pulling from shopping behaviour, product-detail pages, brand stores and advertiser websites to ensure the final output resonates with real shoppers rather than just ticking creative boxes.
The tool supports multiple formats – Amazon DSP, Sponsored Display, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Brands Video and Streaming TV – and gives advertisers granular control at every stage, so they can edit everything from the overarching concept to the most minor scene detail without needing a designer or a brief. For a market stuffed with brands that have sharp products but thin creative budgets, that is a significant offer.
“AI is fundamentally changing what is possible in advertising. With Creative Agent and Ads Agent, we are giving every advertiser access to AI-powered intelligence and our insights be it a small business or an established brand. Our AI-powered tools help them create smarter, launch faster, and drive stronger business outcomes at every stage of the campaign lifecycle.” – Girish Prabhu, vice-president and head, Amazon Ads India.
The proof of concept is already in circulation. Frido, a growing Indian consumer brand, used early access to Creative Agent to run a Streaming TV campaign ahead of a sale event. Ganesh Sonawane, chief executive of Frido, is unequivocal: “Creative Agent removes that compromise entirely. We were able to launch our Streaming TV campaign for a sale event faster than ever – and the results were immediate.” The click-through rate for that campaign was 40 per cent higher than usual, Sonawane says, adding that the brand is now “testing more concepts, launching faster, and seeing stronger results, without increasing our creative spend.”
Running the numbers
The second tool, Ads Agent, tackles the unglamorous grind of campaign management. Currently live within Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and heading to Amazon Ads Campaign Manager later this year, it automates the tasks that consume disproportionate hours: identifying audience segments, adjusting pacing across hundreds of simultaneous campaigns, and generating SQL queries for advanced analytics – all through plain-language conversation rather than lines of code.
Advertisers can upload a custom media plan and let Ads Agent construct a campaign structure and ad groups. The tool then reviews thousands of audience segments to surface the most relevant Amazon audiences and keywords, serves them up for human review, and applies approved choices at scale. For AMC users, it translates business questions into complex SQL queries in real time, collapsing what was once a specialist task into a conversational exchange.
Amazon frames both tools as part of a broader full-funnel advertising proposition that already spans Prime Video, Amazon MX Player and third-party publishers, with generative AI now stitched throughout the creative and campaign layer. The company claims that combining first-party shopping signals with agentic AI delivers “accuracy and depth that drives real business outcomes” – a claim Frido’s 40 per cent CTR uplift lends at least some early credibility to.
