Pavana Kumar Chandana

Pavana Kumar Chandana is a Principal Engineering Manager with 19 years of experience modernizing legacy financial-services and healthcare systems into cloud-native platforms designed for scale, resiliency, and regulatory assurance. Across leadership roles at Northern Trust, CVS Health, and Cigna Healthcare, Chandana has repeatedly taken on transformation programs where the engineering mandate is not simply new feature delivery, but the re-architecture of mission-critical systems under strict compliance constraints—balancing speed, security, auditability, and operational continuity.

Chandana’s technical foundation spans enterprise cloud and platform engineering—Azure, Kubernetes, PCF, and microservices—supported by deep integration capabilities across REST/GraphQL APIs, Kafka and Solace messaging, and production observability with tools such as Dynatrace. This platform skillset is complemented by applied automation and AI experience, including Azure Cognitive Services and agentic AI patterns, along with modern data engineering exposure through Spark, Databricks, and Informatica. A dual competency in modern languages (Java/Spring Boot, Python) and legacy stacks (COBOL, DB2) has positioned Chandana to bridge traditional systems into modular architectures without compromising the operational controls expected in securities servicing, custody operations, claims processing, and prescription benefit management.

At Northern Trust, Chandana’s work is defined by large-scale platform modernization. In the Trading Platform Modernization initiative, Chandana architected and led delivery of more than 100 APIs supporting trade execution, reconciliation, and reporting—enabling integration with external industry partners such as Fidelity, NSCC, Matrix, DST, and CMX. Beyond API modernization, Chandana introduced agentic AI automation for exception handling, reducing manual intervention and improving straight-through processing across thousands of daily trades—an approach that blends operational efficiency with disciplined controls in a highly regulated workflow.

Chandana also directed the NT Digitizer deployment, applying AI/ML-based document processing using Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to compress processing timelines from hours to minutes while improving accuracy and compliance readiness. This initiative reflects a broader theme in Chandana’s work: modernizing operational bottlenecks with automation that is production-governed, measurable, and designed for auditability. In a separate Account Onboarding Automation program, Chandana’s team replaced legacy infrastructure with API-driven platforms that reduced onboarding time by more than 40%, improving throughput while strengthening consistency and control.

In healthcare, Chandana’s leadership has focused on scaling benefits and claims platforms where correctness and privacy are foundational requirements. At CVS Health, Chandana managed the Benefit Builder module within the Prescription Benefit Management ecosystem on the Cognizant TriZetto Facets platform—improving benefit-configuration scalability, reducing claim-processing turnaround time by 30%, and reinforcing HIPAA-aligned delivery practices. Earlier at Cigna Healthcare, Chandana developed the Claims Book of Record—an enterprise repository processing approximately one million claims per day—reducing reconciliation errors by 30–40% and strengthening the integrity of downstream reporting and financial controls.

Chandana’s work has been recognized both operationally and publicly. NT Digitizer received recognition as “Most Cutting-Edge IT Initiative” at the 2021 American Financial Technology Awards, with coverage noted across industry outlets including WatersTechnology, Business Wire, FinTech Futures, and MarketsMedia. Additional contributions to Northern Trust’s Security Master platform—powered by TCS BaNCS—reduced manual entitlement processing by 60–70% and established an architecture referenced in Northern Trust communications and coverage in Global Custodian.

As a leader, Chandana is known for building delivery capability across distributed teams in the United States, Mexico, and India. This includes implementing structured training programs, knowledge-sharing cadences, and engineering best practices that improve execution consistency while developing domain expertise in complex financial-services and healthcare operations. Underlying these programs is a sustained commitment to responsible innovation: meeting HIPAA requirements in healthcare systems, aligning financial platforms with SEC/FINRA expectations, and implementing data privacy and governance controls as first-class engineering requirements.

Taken together, Chandana’s profile reflects an engineering leader who modernizes platforms not only through technology upgrades, but through operational redesign—embedding observability, compliance, and automation into the architecture so systems become faster, safer, and easier to run at scale.