In
Rahul Todkar
Profile
Rahul Todkar has three core principles he lives by: always be learning, nurture an innovative mindset, and develop insatiable curiosity. These principles have shaped his life from childhood to up until his decision to come to the United States to pursue a graduate degree. When he was considering schools to apply, he was especially attracted to the title of our department: Industrial and Management Systems Engineering. When he saw the diversity of courses in our program, he decided to attend WVU.
When Rahul completed his coursework, he went to work for Comscore. At the time, Comscore was a small company that used data analytics to understand consumer behavior. “I found that my coursework in statistics and operations research to be a perfect fit for the work that Comscore was doing,” Rahul says. After being at Comscore for close to a year, Rahul joined Capital One. He was involved in data analytics in driving business strategies applied to create and market various financial products within Capital One. The results of his efforts led to significant increases in annual revenue and customer growth.
Rahul was then recruited to join PayPal. As he describes the move, Rahul says: “Given the world was rapidly moving towards digital, I wanted to gain new experience in financial transactions in more of an online environment.” He was head of their Global Digital Customer Experience and Product Analytics team. At PayPal, he learned importance of being a Technologist and focusing on end customer in addition to the business metrics. He used advanced analytics and technology solutions to develop new products and optimize the performance of existing products leading to significant customer benefits and revenue impact for PayPal.
After being at PayPal for 2.5 years, Rahul was recruited to join Intuit. “Intuit had both online and offline business model, and I wanted to drive growth in this mix environment”. His work there led to establishing and growing successful marketing analytics practice and doing industry leading innovative work in digital and traditional marketing space. He later expanded his team and helped Intuit drive growth in 6 international markets across the globe.
Rahul is currently Vice President of Marketing Analytics and Enterprise Data Science for Charles Schwab. His role is to use data analytics and latest advanced technologies to increase revenues, reduce costs and drive higher customer satisfaction. “We use the phrase that data is the new oil,” Rahul says. “The ability to generate insights from data is extremely critical for any business.” In this role, Rahul is focused on leveraging latest innovations in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to benefit clients of Charles Schwab.
Rahul has some general advice for students to be successful in life and professional career:
- “If you are constantly learning and expanding your skills, you won’t have to look for jobs. Companies will seek you out.”
- “Be scrappy. Be nimble. Be agile and be innovative.”
- “Always think about adding value and how you can be of help to someone else.”
Bio
As VP of Charles Schwab & Co.’s Marketing Analytics & Data Science Department, Rahul is responsible for driving company-wide growth by leading marketing analytics, digital analytics, experimentation and enterprise data science. His focus is concentrated in three areas: (1) Digital media optimization and programmatic marketing (2) Journey marketing utilizing multi-touch attribution and media mix modeling and (3) Leveraging AI/Machine learning, NLP, and geo-spatial analytics.
Prior to Schwab, Rahul was at Intuit as Head of Global channel marketing analytics and optimization. He led analytics efforts to drive new user acquisition, x-sell/upsell and multi-channel, multi-device experience across Intuit’s Small Business Group. In this role, Rahul oversaw all aspects of analytics, customer experience optimization and data strategy including digital [web/mobile] analytics, offline/online marketing spend optimization, personalization, media mix modeling, and multi-touch attribution. Before Intuit, Rahul held progressive leadership positions at eBay, PayPal and Capital One overseeing various aspects of marketing, product and customer optimization.
