In March, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—the powerful federal banking regulator—tapped Prashant Kumar Bhardwaj as the first person to lead its mission to police fintech firms and the banks that power them.
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On his resume, Bhardwaj claimed he was the chief information officer at Ohio-based Fifth Third Bank between 2006 and 2010, a role that reported to the chief financial officer and oversaw a $330 million budget. The bank—one of the largest consumer banks in the midwest—never employed Bhardwaj, a spokesperson said.
Bhardwaj’s resume also said he was a director of information technology at Citi, based in New York, between 1994 and 2000. The bank has no record of his employment, according to a spokesperson.
He also claimed to have held the role of Chief Information Officer & Digital Transformation Officer at Ohio-based Huntington Bank from 2010 to 2015, reporting to the CEO and the board and managing a $250 million budget while overseeing a team of more than 500 employees. However, the position of Chief Information Officer was held by other people during that time period. One of the men who held the role said he had never heard of Bhardwaj. Huntington declined to comment.
Along with purportedly attaining top roles at large banks, Bhardwaj also claimed to have held several high-ranking positions at consulting firms. This included a job as a managing director for banking, insurance and financial services technology at Accenture, which Bhardwaj claimed to have held from 2018 to late 2022, at which point he applied for the job at the OCC. Bhardwaj claimed he was in charge of managing 14 directors and 22,000 global team members, and worked on projects such as leading an IT audit of JPMorgan Chase.
But Accenture only has a record of employing someone named Prashant Bhardwaj in a senior manager role, a rank significantly lower than the purported managing director position. His tenure at Accenture lasted less than one year, ending in June 2019, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Bhardwaj’s resume also outlines a role at an obscure Ohio-based consultancy called Das Gemacht, where he was senior vice president. He claimed the role involved managing a team of five senior directors and 3,000 global team members, and that he grew the practice to generate $386 million in revenue while working with large clients such as PNC Bank, US Bank and KeyBank on technology initiatives.
A LinkedIn profile for Das Gemacht, which claims to operate across 44 locations serving 137 Fortune 500 clients, lists only seven employees—none of whom responded to requests for comment. A 2013 lawsuit filed by Das Gemacht in the District Court for Southern District of Ohio–against a small consulting client that allegedly refused to pay a $117,000 bill–noted that Das Gemacht’s principal place of business was a small residential house in Dublin, Ohio. (Das Gemacht later dropped the case).
When it hired Bhardwaj, the OCC touted his supposedly vast experience. In an internal note to staff sent in March, which The Information obtained, OCC senior deputy comptroller Grovetta Gardineer cited Bhardwaj’s roles at Accenture, Fifth Third, Huntington and Citi as evidence of “his considerable expertise on matters involving digital assets, fintech partnerships, advanced data analytics, cloud adoption and other changing technologies and business models that affect OCC-supervised banks.” Gardineer didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Heavily redacted correspondence between the OCC and Bhardwaj obtained by The Information shows that the agency asked Bhardwaj for recent pay stubs and to flag any potential conflicts of interests in a financial disclosure prior to confirming his appointment.
The OCC also asked Bhardwaj to confirm the dates he was conferred his two Master’s degrees, which he claimed to have received from the University of Cincinnati and the International Management Institute Universiade de Brussels–the latter of which does not exist, as previously reported by Fintech Business Weekly, which first noted Bhardwawj’s disappearance from the agency.
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Snippings 