Murthy Veeraghanta and the pleasure of making banking work

Ask a founder to name a favorite milestone and you might expect a large number. Murthy Veeraghanta remembers the first million dollars in revenue at VSoft. Yet the occasion he prefers is more workaday: a client starts using the software. The project leaves the meeting room and enters the bank. After months of effort, the team gets to see whether everything fits. For him, that is a reason to celebrate.

It is an appealing choice for someone in his business. Banking software has an unusually direct appointment with reality. Somewhere, someone wants to deposit a cheque, draw on a loan or find out whether a payment arrived. A lovely presentation has limited purchasing power at that moment. The system has to do its job.

Veeraghanta co-founded VSoft in Atlanta in 1996 with Shekar Viswanathan. By its twentieth anniversary, the company’s offerings included payment processing, the CoreSoft banking platform and IRIS digital banking. His career follows that widening scope, from handling payment information to connecting the accounts, people and institutions around it. The interesting part is how often the work returns to an ordinary transaction.

“my favorite milestones have always been VSoft's Product Go lives”

Murthy Veeraghanta

An engineer finds the cheque

His preparation began in a different discipline. Veeraghanta studied at Osmania University’s College of Technology and then IIT Kanpur, where his studies included chemical engineering. There is a certain pleasure in a career that refuses to obey the name on the syllabus. Banking eventually supplied the problems that occupied him.

In 1986, he took an opportunity in the United States with Tata Burroughs to work on banking technology. He later started Vector Consulting, in 1990. As he and his partner studied bank operations, cheque processing offered an opening for a software business. VSoft followed six years later.

A cheque is a modest piece of paper with a demanding itinerary. It carries instructions that institutions must capture, interpret and process. VSoft’s early payments work placed the company inside that operational world. As its products expanded, the same question kept acquiring new forms: how could a bank handle more of its work efficiently?

In 2004, Veeraghanta established the Indian arm, VSoft Technologies, in Hyderabad. By December 2014, he was describing a business serving more than 130 cooperative financial institutions in India, alongside cheque processing and core banking work. The cooperative institutions matter to this story. They take the discussion beyond the familiar image of a large commercial bank and into a different set of operating requirements.

Core banking, payment processing and outsourced services also gave customers different ways to use the company’s technology. An institution could have choices about the platform and how it was operated. For a founder selling to banks of different sizes, those arrangements belong to the product’s usefulness as much as the features do. The buyer still has a bank to run after the installation.

A card is only as useful as the system behind it

In Odisha, the work became particularly concrete. In 2015, Veeraghanta described a cloud-enabled deployment connecting Odisha State Cooperative Bank and all 17 of its District Central Cooperative Banks to the National Financial Switch. Access to a wider ATM network made agricultural credit something a farmer could reach through a card.

The same account described VSoft’s Kisan Loan System and a proposed connection between 323 district-bank branches and more than 2,709 Primary Agricultural Credit Societies. Multiple agricultural loans could be handled through lines of credit linked to a single RuPay-enabled account. The point of that arrangement was practical: several obligations, one usable point of access.

Getting there involved moving records from older systems in different formats. The team built a framework to extract, transform and load that information. Staff training took place in the regional language. These details deserve their share of the attention. Data migration and training are where a proposal meets the people who must carry it out.

Agricultural banking makes the cost of an awkward process easy to imagine. The service has to fit an institution’s lending arrangements as well as the customer’s need to use the money. Veeraghanta’s account puts both sides in the same picture. An account, a card and a network have to operate together before the promised convenience becomes an everyday fact.

The business owner hiding in a retail account

His attention to the customer’s actual work also appears in his writing about small businesses. In January 2017, he argued that financial institutions should support their business clients with a more coherent banking offering. Separate platforms for personal and business banking could leave both the customer and the institution dealing with fragments.

His proposed response was a unified platform that gave the institution a consolidated view and the account holder a consistent experience across channels. Flexibility mattered because customers’ preferences would keep changing. A bank could hardly expect a business owner to arrange the working day around the organizational chart of its software suppliers.

There was a matching product example in IRIS. Explaining its design, Veeraghanta described an account holder beginning a loan application on a phone and completing it later on a tablet. That little journey says more than the phrase “omnichannel” generally manages. The customer has changed devices. The application should remember what the customer was doing.

“If you cannot ensure data protection, you’re in the wrong industry.”

Murthy Veeraghanta, 2017

In a June 2017 interview, he paired easier banking with the need for usable institutional tools and built-in data protection. He also described technical support through several channels. Convenience, in that account, extended to the people operating the bank’s systems. A service that frustrates employees has found an indirect way to frustrate customers.

By March 2023, he was again urging credit unions to remember members who owned businesses. Consumer banking platforms could leave gaps around financing, accepting payments, separating business and personal activity, or managing unpredictable income. Those customers might already be members. Their needs required a closer look.

The recurrence is revealing. Across years of product discussion, Veeraghanta keeps returning to people whose financial lives do not fit a tidy consumer transaction. A farmer has more than one loan. A business owner has different obligations from a salaried account holder. Useful software has to leave room for the complications.

Instant needs preparation

When FedNow arrived, Veeraghanta brought the conversation back to implementation. His December 2023 article organized the task around use cases, the digital experience and the questions a bank’s own team should ask. He urged institutions to give the work an owner and consider both staff and account holders.

The suggested preparation included reviewing data requirements, handling erroneous or fraudulent payments and testing reporting scenarios. Those are the kinds of questions that survive the excitement of an announcement. Faster movement changes what has to happen around the payment, too. Someone must still understand the record afterward.

One exercise he proposed was to create imaginary retail and commercial accounts, then work through the reporting each would need. Take an existing report and reconsider it with real-time payments included. It is a small rehearsal with a useful purpose: letting a bank discover awkward questions before customers encounter them. That suggestion gives his approach a human scale. Behind the networks and product names are people trying to understand what happened to their money. A report has to make that intelligible after the payment has moved.

VSoft had already announced that its Wings core and Arya digital banking platforms integrated with Pidgin. The connection supported payment rails including FedNow and The Clearing House’s real-time payments network. It brought the customer’s banking channel, the core system and payment routing into a connected offering.

There is a family connection in that work. Pidgin’s founder and CEO, Abhishek Veeraghanta, is Murthy’s son. When Murthy appeared on ABN Telugu’s Best in the Business, Abhishek publicly shared his pride in seeing his father represent VSoft. Murthy shared the program on LinkedIn as his first television interview. Banking infrastructure briefly became a family viewing recommendation.

By 2025, company announcements were placing President Abhishek Veeraghanta at the center of VSoft’s push toward API-first, cloud-ready core banking. The company also reported that it continued to process 1.5 million cheques a day. The older business and newer ambitions were sharing the same company. Payment habits do not consult a product launch calendar before changing.

The distinction matters when looking at Veeraghanta’s career. The company’s early cheque processing work did not vanish when digital channels arrived. Its twentieth-anniversary account described an expanding portfolio built around financial institutions of different sizes. In the 2025 account, payment processing still sat beside core modernization. The work had accumulated new layers, and the operating problem remained familiar: helping institutions put the pieces together while continuing to serve the people who depended on them.

What counts as a good day

Outside the product discussions, Veeraghanta’s stated preferences include running, reading, South Indian food, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and Walt Disney World. That is an enjoyable itinerary: a run, a meal, a complicated family novel, then Orlando. It gives a little texture to a career so often described through systems and institutions.

His own measure of satisfaction remains easy to understand. People have worked together for months. A client begins using what they built. The team can see the result. For a career spent around the movement of money, it is a pleasingly tangible way to keep score: another piece of banking has started working.