Opus Technologies, the engineering partner to payment providers, banks, and fintechs built around the promise of “Business Value Acceleration,” has brought one of the biggest names in global IT services onto its Board of Directors. Phaneesh Murthy, whose four-decade career helped shape how the modern technology services industry sells, scales, and delivers, now sits on the board alongside Founder and Executive Chairman Ramesh Mengawade and Chief Executive Officer Srini Rajamani.
And for a company whose whole job is modernizing the rails of banking and payments, this isn’t really a flashy headline hire. It’s more like two stories that were always heading toward each other, finally meeting, because both are built on the same belief: real value comes from systematic engineering, not from chasing whatever’s in front of you.
A Career That Mirrors the Industry’s Own Evolution
Here’s the thing about the path that led Phaneesh Murthy to the Opus board. It lines up almost perfectly with how the global services industry itself grew up.
His early years were at Infosys, from 1995 to 2002, where he ran Sales and Marketing worldwide, led Communications, and headed the Product Solutions Group. As the company’s global sales head, he’s widely credited with helping push revenues from roughly two million dollars to around seven hundred million in under a decade. A lot of that came down to the Global Delivery Model he helped pioneer, which used teams spread across time zones to keep work moving around the clock. The trick was that it solved the problem through smart process design, not by asking people to burn themselves out. That’s exactly why it stuck and became an industry standard.
Then he moved into the operator’s seat. As CEO and President of iGate Corporation, now part of Capgemini, he turned his scaling ideas into the Integrated Technology and Operations model, or iTOPS. Instead of treating technology and business process as two separate things you buy, iTOPS rolled them into one delivery engine. And he paired it with a commercial idea that changed what clients expected: you pay for outcomes and productivity, not hours on a timesheet. The numbers backed it up. Over his time there, enterprise value went from about seventy million dollars to somewhere around four and a half to four point eight billion, including the headline-grabbing purchase of Patni Computer Systems, which was actually bigger than iGate when the deal happened.
The Investor and Advisor Years
The next chapter added the things boards really care about: capital discipline and good portfolio judgment. In 2013, Phaneesh Murthy founded Primentor Inc., a strategy consulting firm that helps senior leaders at big organizations create shareholder value and stay nimble when things get uncertain. Since then, he’s served on the advisory board of the global private equity firm Partners Group, and since 2014, he’s been an Operating Partner at New State Capital Partners, focusing on business services, technology, and business process outsourcing.
That investor’s eye is backed up by a real record of creating value from the boardroom. During his time on the board at CSS Corporation, for example, EBITDA grew many times over, which fed into the company’s eventual sale to a private equity buyer. And across more than twenty-five years, he’s structured and run large-scale outsourcing deals for Fortune 500 companies. Those are exactly the kind of complex, multi-year relationships that sit at the center of the banking and payments work Opus does.
More recently, he’s picked up advisory roles across a deliberately mixed bag of technology companies, including AI-first software firm InfoBeans, digital transformation specialist CriticalRiver, and agentic-AI challenger Covasant Technologies. The variety is the whole point. Watching how different organizations adopt AI at the same time gives him a view most single-company executives simply don’t have, and it’s made him pretty sharp about the gap between AI theater and AI that actually moves the needle. He’s been openly skeptical of a market full of chatbots and shallow automation, and far more interested in systems that keep humans in the loop and can genuinely run a real business process from start to finish.
Where His Track Record Meets Opus’s Mandate
Opus builds solutions for banks, payment providers, and fintechs across modernization, cloud, data and AI, financial crime and compliance, and AI-powered automation. Every one of those is an area where the things Phaneesh Murthy spent a career proving carry straight over.
His push for outcome-based commercial models fits neatly with Opus’s whole promise of accelerating, realizing, and maximizing business value instead of just billing for effort. His habit of building capability before the demand shows up speaks directly to the modernization work financial institutions need to do before regulation or competition forces the issue. His iTOPS instinct for fusing technology and operations into one delivery engine is the same instinct behind Opus’s domain-native, AI-augmented approach. And having advised a major bank on process automation, shifting more responsibility offshore, and lifting productivity, he’s got hands-on credibility with exactly the kind of institutions Opus was built to serve.
There’s a nice symmetry at the leadership level, too. Opus was founded by a payments pioneer whose ventures were acquired by global names like Mastercard and Western Union, and it’s run today by a CEO with decades of transformation experience. Adding a director who built his career scaling services businesses from millions into billions, and who now brings a private-equity-trained take on governance and value creation, rounds out a board that’s clearly set up for the company’s next stage of growth.
In the end, board appointments are really just statements about where a company thinks it’s headed. By bringing Phaneesh Murthy into the room, Opus is signaling that it wants to scale with the same discipline he brought to Infosys and iGate, to compete on outcomes rather than inputs, and to treat AI as a genuine engineering capability rather than a marketing line. For a company leading the way in banking, payments, and fintech engineering, it’s hard to think of a better fit.