Making people redundant is a no-win: Revolut India CEO on AI job cuts

Job loss is usually the quintessential, and perhaps the first, outcome of any disruption – technological or otherwise. The case with artificial intelligence (AI) is no different. Whether it is the recent layoffs at Samsung India as soaring chip prices squeeze margins or the en masse firings at cloud giant Oracle, apprehensions about getting an email saying “you’re being let go” are very much real.

The banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector in India is also facing the heat as some of the largest private banks such as ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, among others, sharply trim their headcount in 2026.

But, do companies really need to eliminate roles as AI takes over most of the repetitive jobs? Paroma Chatterjee, India CEO of Revolut, a London-based financial technology company, believes it is essential to create targeted jobs in the age of AI instead of just cutting jobs.


Speaking to The Economic Times Digital during the Global Fintech Fest 2026, Chatterjee said, “We don't look at AI as downsizing jobs. I've heard enough of my industry counterparts talk about how much their workforce has gone down since they switched to a process (automation). That is not something we believe in. We believe building based on what you require as AI is embedded into our design thinking.”

Revolut plans to hire for about 1,500 roles in India this year but has also invested in developing an internal sovereign language model with NVIDIA called PRAGMA to streamline workflows. It aims to replace multiple siloed systems across fraud, credit, engagement, and recommendations with PRAGMA’s shared behavioural intelligence layer.

Chatterjee said Revolut’s approach is to take one step forward on AI and then ensure its people match that. Whenever the company is scoping a “business line or a product line or a process or anything”, she said, the first question is how AI can be used to find a solution.

She added, "The [tech-based] foundation is laid out without looking at the number of people. Therefore, it's always a human growing topic with us with every new business line that we're bringing in. We look at what we need in terms of human intervention and then we size out how many people we need and then we hire for that."

However, Chatterjee acknowledges that fewer people in her organisation are now doing the same jobs they did before. But she said this is different from the traditional approach followed by larger organisations.“Traditionally, most organisations have done it the other way around. They start with processes that humans will run, hire as many people as they need for the scale they aspire to, and then gradually migrate those processes to automation, making people redundant. We believe it is a no-win,” she said.

Also Read: BFSI moves beyond AI pilots as firms chase measurable business value: Report

PRAGMA and Karma – the dual operating model

Revolut’s PRAGMA is a family of transformer-based models that reads each customer's financial history as a temporal signal. Ranging from tens of millions to a billion parameters, it fuses attributes, events, and history via specialised encoders and structured tokenisation. NVIDIA Llama‑Nemotron‑Embed‑1B‑v2 is used to embed unstructured text fields such as merchant descriptions.

The company has not yet publicly rolled out the model for its customers and did not wish to disclose the investment amount at this point.

Elaborating on the rationale of building a sovereign model instead of subscribing to closed-source models such as Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, she said, “The thing about Claude and a GPT is they are very generic and industry agnostic. Our thesis is they are overloaded with a lot of generic data, which at times colours specificity.”

Chatterjee believes that since the company is focused on financial services, they need both depth and breadth rather than having one of them. “Think of it [PRAGMA] as a super specialised Claude for fintech.”

Revolut claims that early deployments of PRAGMA have indicated performance gains over legacy baselines such as 2.3x higher accuracy at identifying credit default risk; 65% more fraud cases caught, with 17% greater precision in alerts; and 41% more relevant product recommendations across retail and business accounts.

But, the real-world applications and outcomes are yet to be seen.

In addition, the company operates Karma – a framework layered on top of Revolut People, in-house People Ops platform – to manage employee performance and optimise human resources. Google’s Gemini is its underlying foundational model.

“Certain critically important things, particularly around regulatory compliance, are coded as areas which either earn or deduct karma... If you earn positive karma, you actually get a multiplier on your year-end bonuses. And that doesn't just come to that individual, it comes to the entire unit... If there is an audit observation, hypothetically, it affects the entire company. Because an entire unit's bonuses can be docked because of that, there's collective responsibility. So, if one person isn't pulling their weight... others then step in because they know that if it’s not done, the outcome is going to affect,” she opined.

Revolut has converted this into a separate business line in Europe and maintains that the product can compete with traditional HR management systems (HRMS) such as Workday and Darwinbox. However, it is not yet available in India.

Women in fintech

The fintech ecosystem is still heavily male-dominated. A Cambridge University study argues that women in fintech face the ‘triple glass ceiling’ at the intersection of financial, technological, and entrepreneurial gender inequalities.

The report suggests that women account for only 7.69% of (co-) founders, 18.2% of executive committee members, and merely 4.04% of fintech companies are led by a woman.

In India, the case is not too different either.

Elaborating her experience during the GFF, she said, “The first three rows [during sessions] were reserved for... the RBI dignitaries... and industry leaders... Somebody pointed out that it's 100% male and I was the only woman sitting there in those three rows... It's literally one woman sitting in a sea of suits. As a woman, it doesn't make me happy... it's a big irony that there’s one woman surrounded by a sea of men in suits.”

Chatterjee believes women should position themselves as leaders, rather than defining themselves primarily by their gender. “I think I'm here not because I position myself as a woman in the industry... I am here because I position myself as a leader throughout my 25-year-old career. I positioned myself as a manager who can do the job the best agnostic of whoever else is around, whether they're male or female.”