Ilya Azarov

Chief Digital Product Officer. For 18 years I've launched fintech products and grown them into market leaders — from Russia's #1 kids' bank to family services and proactive personal finance. Today I help banks embed AI into product development. Founder & CEO of game studio MadFox.

ilya@azarov.ai LinkedIn Phone

Work & achievements

Product strategy & AI at bank scale

Independent Consulting·Independent Product & Strategy Consultant·Mar 2024 — Present

Clients: Alfa-Bank, MTS Bank, Bereke Bank (Kazakhstan), Skolkovo, Interise Group.
Built my own AI-agent framework Validate IDEA that dramatically speeds up product hypothesis validation and reduces the risk of shipping the wrong product.
Embedding AI agents into product teams and reshaping how products get built.
Building product strategies and cookbooks that teams use to launch new products.

Russia's #1 kids' bank — 3.6M monthly users

Sberbank · SberKids·Managing Director·Feb 2020 — Feb 2024

Brought to market the first and now largest, most successful kids' mobile bank in Russia — SberKids — with an active audience of over 3.6M monthly users.
Built the product from scratch — app and debit card for kids and parents — and grew it from 4K users to the segment leader in 3 years.
Built and delivered a 3-year strategy generating ₽500M in annual revenue.
Won Best KidTech CX project, 2021.

SberKids page

MegaFon's neo-bank — 10× user growth

MegaLabs · MegaFon Bank·Head of Digital, MegaFon Bank·May 2018 — Feb 2020

Launched a neo-bank that united a phone number and a bank card in a single app.
Grew the active base 10× — over 330K users within a year.

Round — underlying bank

Russia's first joint account & proactive personal finance

Alfa-Bank · Alfa-mobile·CPO, mobile bank·Sep 2015 — May 2018

As CPO of Alfa-mobile, I owned family services, PFM and the kids' direction.
Launched Russia's first joint account for close ones — 40,000+ users in the first 3 months with zero advertising, growing high-margin liabilities by ₽180M.
Built a unique proactive approach to personal finance: it forecasts future income and expenses and nudges users to adjust early — so they never slip into the red.
App penetration doubled to 11.2%.

Family account & proactive finance in Alfa-mobile

Personal projects

LandAI — validate a product idea in 24 hours

landai.ru·Founder

An AI mentor helps validate a product idea in 24 hours — no months of research and development.
It frames the hypothesis, analyses the market and competitors, builds a financial model and assesses the project's potential.
It launches a test landing page and drives traffic — so early demand shows up in real conversions and leads.

LandAI — validate product ideas in 24 hours

landai.ru

MadFox — mobile game studio

madfox.dev·Founder & CEO

An indie mobile game studio: our own titles — from idea and prototype to store release.

madfox.dev

Let's talk products, growth & AI

Open to product leadership roles, consulting and partnerships.

ilya@azarov.ai LinkedIn Phone