Hyperlayer names first Head of AI as banks push AI

Hyperlayer has appointed Shantanu Lodh as its first Head of AI, as banks step up efforts to embed artificial intelligence in day-to-day operations.

Lodh joins the banking software company after roles across financial services and technology, with experience in data platforms, AI architecture and engineering in regulated businesses. He will lead Hyperlayer's AI strategy and technical delivery.

The appointment strengthens the leadership team at the company founded by former Morgan Stanley International Chief Executive Officer Rob Rooney. It also comes after a USD 40 million funding round, equivalent to about GBP 30 million, as the group expands internationally.

Hyperlayer sells software that sits above banks' core systems, allowing lenders to introduce new products without replacing legacy infrastructure. Its focus is on turning customer instructions, or instructions initiated by AI agents, into financial actions that can be checked, authorised and recorded.

The hire comes amid a broader shift in banking. Financial institutions have spent the past few years testing AI in narrow use cases, but many are now trying to move those systems into governed production environments, where auditability, fraud controls and permissions matter more.

An index compiled by Evident found that banks in its sample reported nearly 50% more AI use cases in 2025. The increase points to stronger deployment activity, even as questions remain over governance, infrastructure and the returns banks can show on investment.

Career history

Lodh most recently worked at Allvue Systems, where he was Head of AI Architecture and set up the AI Platform Team. That work included agentic AI customer products for document processing and private equity workflows.

Earlier, he was Director of Engineering at The Economist Intelligence Unit. He also spent three and a half years at Shawbrook Bank, where he became Director of Data Platforms and led the bank's data platform after building its data engineering and data science function.

Before that, he was Global Head of Data Science at Bottomline Technologies. He studied economics at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford.

At Hyperlayer, his remit will centre on the systems that interpret intent and apply rules before money moves. That includes permissions, fraud checks and audit trails for every action taken through the platform.

Those issues have become more pressing as banks explore what the industry has begun to call agentic banking, where software agents may initiate tasks or transactions on behalf of customers. For banks, the challenge is not only to automate an action, but also to show it was properly authorised and can withstand regulatory scrutiny.

Hyperlayer argues that this layer can be built without replacing a bank's core ledger or payments systems. Instead, it is positioning its software as a control layer that sits on top of existing infrastructure and makes accounts programmable in a way that remains visible to risk and compliance teams.

Lodh set out that view in his first comments on the move.

"What drew me to Hyperlayer is that it treats AI as an engineering and governance discipline, not a headline. The interesting work in banking now is beneath the model, building systems that can take an instruction and turn it into a financial action that is safe, explainable and holds up under scrutiny. That is a genuinely hard problem, and Hyperlayer is further into solving it in production than any other solution I've seen," said Shantanu Lodh, Head of AI, Hyperlayer.

Rooney said the company wanted someone with experience inside banks, rather than only in research or early-stage AI development.

"The real challenge is turning what a customer or an agent asks for into a financial action that stands up to a regulator. That is a data, architecture and governance problem, and Shan has spent his career solving exactly that kind of problem inside real banks rather than in a lab. He knows what it takes to make AI trustworthy where the money actually moves, which is precisely what our clients need as they scale AI beyond experimentation," said Rooney.

The hire reflects how competition in banking technology is shifting away from model development alone and towards control, oversight and integration with older systems. For many lenders, replacing core platforms remains too costly and risky, increasing interest in tools that can add new services on top of existing infrastructure.

Hyperlayer, founded in 2023, serves banks and other financial institutions that want to launch new products while keeping established back-end systems in place. Its argument is that the next phase of AI in banking will depend less on experiments at the edge and more on whether firms can manage authorisation and accountability for every action.

In that context, the company is betting that leadership in AI will be judged by whether software can move from instruction to auditable financial execution in a regulated environment.