Movers & Shakers

Databricks Appoints Ashraf Safdar as APJ Financial Services Go-To-Market Lead

Databricks has announced the appointment of Ashraf Safdar as Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) Financial Services Go-To-Market (GTM) Lead, reinforcing the company’s accelerating momentum across the region.

Based in Singapore, Ashraf will lead Databricks’ financial services GTM strategy across APJ, working closely with customers and partners to help banks, insurers, and capital markets firms accelerate their data and AI initiatives. His appointment underscores Databricks’ commitment to meeting growing demand for data and AI-driven transformation in financial services.

Ashraf brings more than 20 years of experience across cloud, data, analytics, and financial services. He joins Databricks from Amazon Web Services, where he held senior leadership roles, most recently as Cross-Industry Sales Leader for Financial Services. He has also held leadership positions at renowned financial institutions, including HSBC Private Bank, IHS Markit, and UBS spanning commercial and advisory strategy, risk analytics and business transformation.

“Financial Services in Asia is one of the fastest growing businesses at Databricks. We’re at an inflection point that calls for dedicated regional leadership to support this growth”, said Junta Nakai, VP, Global Head of Financial Services, Cybersecurity and Public Sector at Databricks. “We continue to invest in APJ to deepen the commitment to our clients in the region. Ashraf’s deep industry expertise will support our customers as we help them navigate a quickly evolving Data + AI landscape."

“I’m excited to join Databricks at a pivotal moment of growth in the region,” said Ashraf Safdar, APJ Financial Services Go-To-Market Lead at Databricks. “Across APJ, financial institutions are looking to leverage data and AI to drive growth through hyper-personalized customer engagement, real-time analytics, and AI-driven decisioning, as well as to protect their organisations from risk and fraud. I look forward to working closely with our customers and partners to unlock these use cases on Databricks, helping them innovate faster while operating more efficiently and responsibly at scale.”

Leading financial services institutions in the region including National Australia Bank, Optiver, HDFC Bank, Siam Commercial Bank, and Techcombank use the Databricks Platform to harness data and AI for real‑time fraud detection, financial crime monitoring, credit‑risk analytics, compliance, and AI‑driven customer analytics.

Financial services customers in the APJ region will be able to leverage Databricks’ latest innovations, Lakebase, its serverless Postgres database built for AI agents, and Genie, its conversational AI assistant that lets any employee chat with their data.