# Anurag Puranik

> Anurag Puranik is Coast's Chief Risk Officer and a founding executive who built and scaled the fleet-fintech company's finance, risk, fraud, credit, analytics and operations functions. After more than a decade in consumer and commercial lending at Discover, PNC and KeyBank, he brought a large-bank command of credit to a startup determined to make underwriting faster. His public work centers on a hard problem: reducing the time and labor of legitimate applications while making fraud more costly and difficult.

- **Role:** Chief Risk Officer and founding executive at Coast
- **Organizations:** Coast, KeyBank, PNC, Discover Financial Services, Purdue University
- **Education:** Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Master of Science in Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, CFA Charterholder, CFA Institute
- **Known for:** Built and scaled Coast's finance, risk, fraud, credit, analytics and operations functions from the ground up., Led credit analytics for KeyBank's $34 billion consumer and small-business portfolio., Helped Coast reduce policy-change cycles from the four weeks he knew in banking to as little as 15 minutes.

## Career timeline

- **2009** — Worked as a research consultant at Purdue University's PRISM Center.
- **2010** — Served as a business analysis intern at Kimberly-Clark.
- **2011-2014** — Held analytical roles at Discover Financial Services.
- **2014-2016** — Worked in product strategy for small-business lending at PNC.
- **2016-2021** — Rose to Senior Vice President and Head of Credit Analytics at KeyBank, leading credit work for a $34 billion consumer and small-business portfolio.
- **2021-present** — Joined Coast as a founding executive and built and scaled finance, risk, fraud, credit, analytics and operations; currently serves as Chief Risk Officer.
- **2026** — Outlined Coast's approach to AI-era fraud and governed agentic underwriting on Inscribe's Good Question podcast.

## Achievements

- Built and scaled Coast's finance, risk, fraud, credit, analytics and operations functions from the ground up.
- Led credit analytics for KeyBank's $34 billion consumer and small-business portfolio.
- Helped Coast reduce policy-change cycles from the four weeks he knew in banking to as little as 15 minutes.
- Helped create an onboarding system in which one person can process the application volume that would otherwise require six.
- Helped automate 80-90% of Coast's application path while routing adverse or compliance-sensitive decisions to human review.
- Earned the Chartered Financial Analyst charter in 2017.

## Latest updates

- **2026-07** — Featured in Inscribe's updated 2026 State of Document Fraud research discussing the collapse of traditional verification signals and the need for faster reaction to fraud attacks.
- **2026-01** — Appeared on Inscribe's Good Question podcast to discuss AI-generated documents, metadata-based detection, governed agents and human-in-the-loop credit decisions.
- **2025-09** — Coast publicly identified Puranik as Chief Risk Officer in a discussion of the company's evolving fraud strategy.

## Links

- Website: https://coastpay.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anuragpuranik

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/anurag-puranik
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-28