Ram Balasubrahmanian

Ram Balasubrahmanian is a Senior Data Governance and AI Governance leader with 15+ years across FICO, EY, and regulated BFSI platforms. He is a DAMA CDMP Practitioner who builds governed, auditable data systems for enterprise scale and AI adoption. Read full background.

Yes. Ram is based in Bengaluru, available immediately, and open to Director and Head-of-function mandates across data governance, AI governance, DataOps, data quality, and metadata — in BFSI & other data-intensive domains, across UAE, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the broader GCC, India, APAC, and remote-first global teams. Connect here.

These regulations are new — UAE and Saudi PDPL and Saudi's NDMO standards are 2021–2024 in vintage — so almost no one has deep lived in-region tenure. PDPL is modelled on GDPR and NDMO maps to DAMA-DMBOK, frameworks Ram has worked with directly — GDPR-aligned controls delivered vendor-side for global financial-services clients, and DAMA-DMBOK applied across enterprise platforms (CDMP Governance 83%, Data Quality 88%). He brings the proven parent control plane — 232M+ records protected with audit-ready evidence — and can stand up a PDPL- and NDMO-aligned operating model fast. Strongest fit: global-bank GCC captives, DIFC/ADGM banks, and UAE/KSA fintechs. Read the GCC & PDPL crosswalk.

Unlike most relocating candidates, GDPR is not a framework Ram learned for an exam — he has delivered GDPR-aligned controls from the vendor side for global financial-services clients (classification, masking, lineage, audit evidence), plus published GDPR/EU-AI-Act advisory analysis and working demos. He has also built the kind of AI controls the EU AI Act now mandates — data governance, logging, human-oversight gates and model controls — which you can open as three live demos. The gap is European residence, not European regulation: he is relocating, visa-ready (EU Blue Card / NL Highly Skilled Migrant / Ireland Critical Skills / Germany Opportunity Card), and targets English-first employers — global-bank EU hubs, scaled fintechs and consultancies. Read the EU GDPR & AI-Act crosswalk.

In 2024, family caregiving led Ram to request a lateral move at FICO (same grade, senior IC track); days after his FY24 merit increase and full bonus, he resigned in good standing and served the full 90-day notice through Mar 2025. Since Apr 2025 he has run an independent data & AI governance practice — a Data Steward engagement via Toptal, and he shipped MediGovern RAG and Pipeline Pulse, grew The Governed Data & AI Brief to 2,400+ subscribers, published the EDP knowledge hub, and submitted the DAMA CDMP Master track (2026). See independent-practice deliverables.

At FICO: 95% incident reduction in 3 months, 232M+ records protected per extraction cycle, $2M+ annual failure costs eliminated, and onboarding from 4 weeks to 2–3 days through metadata-driven quality controls across 50+ enterprise clients. Driven by the Detect → Resolve → Prevent → Govern → Scale operating model. Read the case study.

AI governance as an operating model — not a document. Model lifecycle controls, explainability evidence, privacy checks, drift monitoring, human review gates, and audit trails embedded in production rhythm. Read the AI governance perspective.

Yes. Ram built MediGovern RAG — a full retrieval-augmented generation pipeline with production API and open-source code. He holds 6 Anthropic Claude & MCP Certificates of Completion and is passionate about governed AI in production. See demos.

Ram built MediGovern RAG, Pipeline Pulse, and publishes The Governed Data & AI Brief(2,400+). Explore full guides · Live demos.