Leading Through Change: How Rathi Murthy Built a Career at the Intersection of Technology and People

The Human Side of Technology

Rathi Murthy’s career began with curiosity and an engineering foundation. Over more than three decades, that curiosity took her through financial services, consumer technology, healthcare, and enterprise software; through organizations like eBay, Yahoo, Gap, American Express, and Expedia.

Today she is Chief Technology Officer at Varo Bank, one of the first all-digital nationally chartered banks in the United States. The distinction matters more than it sounds. A national charter is not a marketing designation, it means Varo operates under federal banking regulation, carries the same obligations as any brick-and-mortar institution, and has chosen to do all of it without a single physical branch. Murthy runs the technology organization that makes that possible.

What has stayed consistent across the career is harder to put on a resume. She describes it as a belief that technology should improve people’s lives, not as an abstract principle but as a practical filter for the work worth doing. That belief has shaped which roles she took, which problems she stayed on, and eventually which mission she chose to build toward.

Engineering was where it started. The curiosity never left,  and neither did the belief that the best technology work happens through people, not just because of them.

The Constants in a Career Defined by Change

Three principles have guided Murthy across a career that has spanned five industries and more than three decades. Stay curious. Focus on people. Maintain perspective. They are simple to state. Holding onto all three through organizational upheaval, industry shifts, and rapidly changing technology is a different matter.

Curiosity and a focus on people have always worked together for her. Technology moves fast enough that leaders who stop learning lose relevance within a few years, but learning alone does not build organizations. The teams she has led have been built around psychological safety and genuine investment in growth, because that is where the actual work gets done. One without the other produces either technically sharp but brittle organizations, or warm cultures that cannot keep up.

The third principle is where most technology leaders stop showing up. Perspective, for her, is not a philosophical concept,it is a practice. Meditation and mindfulness have been part of how she works, creating space between a situation and a response. In an industry that rewards constant motion and fast decisions, deliberate stillness tends to get dismissed as soft. She has never found it soft.

Beyond Titles and Transformations

Large-scale technology transformations are easy to list. Murthy has led them across multiple industries, building platforms that serve millions of customers worldwide. The numbers exist. She is more interested in what they represent.

The Varo CTO role sits at the top. Not because of the title, but because of the problem. Digital-first banking within a nationally chartered framework means building systems that are modern, compliant, secure, and accessible, simultaneously, without compromise. Rethinking how financial services are delivered to people who have historically had limited access to them is not a small problem. It is the kind that takes years and does not resolve cleanly.

The other milestone she names is mentorship. Watching individuals she has worked with grow into executive roles and lead their own organizations is, by her account, among the most rewarding parts of the career. Technologies get replaced. The people she developed keep building long after any particular platform is retired.

The Qualities That Shaped a Leadership Style

Three qualities run through Murthy’s career in ways that go beyond a standard leadership profile. Resilience shows up in the obvious places, failed projects, organizational upheaval, market shifts. It also shows up in quieter moments of sustained uncertainty, when the right decision is not clear and the pressure to act is real. Her version of it is not about pushing through regardless. It is about staying focused when the landscape keeps moving.

Empathy is what keeps that focus grounded. Understanding what customers actually need, what employees are carrying, what stakeholders are trying to protect — that is where better solutions come from. Leadership that skips that step tends to produce technically correct answers to the wrong questions.

Lifelong learning is the one she returns to most consistently. The skills that built a career to this point are not the skills that will carry it forward. She has internalized that early enough that it shows, not in how she talks about learning, but in how she approaches new technologies.

Product Built Around the Left Behind

Varo Bank occupies a unique position in American financial services. It has the technology culture and customer experience orientation of a digital startup, and the regulatory standing of a federally chartered bank. That combination is rare. It is also the point.

The products are straightforward in description and harder to execute well, digital banking tools that simplify money management, improve financial access, and help customers build stronger financial futures. Personalization, efficiency, design that starts from what users actually need rather than what legacy systems can support. The technology infrastructure makes it possible. The mission makes it worth doing.

What differentiates Varo is not a feature. It is a customer. The bank was built with explicit focus on individuals who have historically been underserved by traditional financial institutions, people for whom fees, minimums, and branch-based access have functioned as barriers rather than inconveniences. Murthy leads the technology organization that serves them.

Financial inclusion is not a branding decision at Varo. It is the operating premise.

Building for Scale, Thinking About People

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are where much of Murthy’s current focus sits — and for good reason. In financial services, the use cases are specific and the value is real. Fraud detection, customer experience, operational efficiency, better decision-making across the organization. The tools exist and the pressure to adopt is significant.

Her interest is not in whether to adopt but in how. Technology leaders, in her view, carry a responsibility to implement innovation thoughtfully and ethically — balancing advancement with human judgment, fairness, transparency, and inclusion. In banking, these are not philosophical preferences. They are obligations with real consequences when ignored.

Beyond AI, the work continues on multiple fronts. Building organizational resilience, strengthening engineering cultures, developing future leaders, creating technology systems that can scale in an environment that does not stay still. These are not secondary priorities. They are what makes responsible AI adoption possible in the first place.

Making Uncertainty Work

Rapid technological change is difficult for any organization to absorb. Leading through it, repeatedly, across industries, over decades, requires something beyond technical competence. Murthy has done it while also navigating senior technology roles in industries where women at that level were, for much of her career, the exception rather than the rule.

She did not make a project out of either challenge. On the change side, she built teams that could absorb disruption without losing direction, diverse perspectives, long-term thinking, and a deliberate resistance to short-term panic. On the representation side, she let results carry the argument and focused energy on creating opportunities for the leaders coming behind her. Not as a formal initiative. Just as part of how she runs an organization.

The through-line across both is the same. Surround yourself with people who think differently, stay focused on outcomes when the environment gets loud, and understand that uncertainty is not a temporary condition to be managed. It is the permanent backdrop against which the actual work gets done.

The Skills That Will Matter Most Next

The advice Murthy offers to aspiring leaders is not motivational. It is practical, and specific to the moment technology is in. Invest in your ability to learn, the skills that earned your current role will not be sufficient for the next one. In technology leadership, relevance requires active maintenance. Develop people skills at the same rate as technical expertise, because leadership is ultimately influence, communication, and the ability to bring people around a shared problem. Technical credibility opens doors. It does not keep them open on its own.

Embrace change rather than manage it from a distance. And stay humble about what leadership actually is — not having answers, but building the conditions in which good teams solve hard problems together.

Beyond the work, Murthy’s attention stays on one longer question: as AI becomes more capable, what happens to the qualities that are distinctly human. Empathy, judgment, creativity, self-awareness, her view is that these become more important, not less. Technology should serve people and strengthen communities. That is not an idealistic position. It is, for her, the only practical one.