TIAA’s Sastry Durvasula works with older companies—and newer tech

For a sense of a day in the life of Sastry Durvasula, consider the myriad pressures of managing the fintech space.

The CIO of retirement financial planning firm TIAA spends his days managing the century-old company’s IT infrastructure and navigating a changing world for customers where a hack or tech failure can result in financial disaster. It’s a high-pressure job—but one that he finds rewarding. What’s important, he told IT Brew, is not losing sight of the big picture.

“In a complex job like this, in a complex company, in a complex industry that is highly regulated, it’s very easy to lose sight of the macro,” Durvasula said.

Age matters. TIAA’s complexity is in part due to its age. The company is 107 years old and was started with a grant from Andrew Carnegie, making it a far cry from financial startups that can come and go in the space of a year or two.

But for Durvasula, that’s nothing new. His career has taken him to a number of companies with long histories, from McKinsey & Company (founded in 1926) to American Express (around since 1850). He told IT Brew that he has helped these older firms with their technological approach.

“These companies are time-tested, they have obviously reinvented themselves multiple times,” Durvasula said. “It’s cool to be part of that reinvention process when there are major tech disruptions.”

New technologies. AI is at the forefront of every industry’s planning at the moment. For a retirement and investment-management company like TIAA, integrating the technology is a matter of protecting the security of the public, many of whom are targeted by bad actors online. That means his job requires monitoring change.

For older adults specifically, AI has opened up a dangerous minefield. It’s harder to detect and report threats as they become more sophisticated; as Durvasula noted, the public is living longer, and with that has come a plethora of hacker tactics aimed at taking advantage of their blind spots. Financial fraud targets TIAA customer retirement accounts, a problem made harder by AI.

“The advent of AI actually makes it hard for them to determine whether it’s spam, so they’re more susceptible, which means our obligation becomes compounded in terms of protecting them,” Durvasula said.

AI can also be deployed on the defender side, Durvasula told IT Brew, making the technology both a risk and an opportunity. Being relevant is an ongoing journey for companies like TIAA who will want to be on the cutting edge. It just requires the right approach.

“Two-thirds of the problem is change management and culture, just like in previous revolutions,” Durvasula said.

It’s a challenge, but one that comes with the territory of pulling firms into the future.

“I always use Newton’s [third] law of motion when it comes to change management in these large companies, 100-year-old companies—everything continues to be in a state of rest unless it’s compelled by a force,” Durvasula said. “For everything you do, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”