Sandeep Bhasin has always had a passion for data and analytics. As a child, he enjoyed memorizing the statistics of his favorite baseball and football players and teams. When the 2011 movie “Moneyball” came out about a baseball manager using computer-generated analysis to find new players, Bhasin was hooked. It’s still one of his favorite movies to this day.
Now, as the global head of insights and analytics at Capital Group in Los Angeles, Bhasin is still pursuing his passion for data. But instead of studying sports metrics, he now focuses on data science, business insights, customer research and developing data strategies to support his company’s digital, marketing, product, sales and service goals.
Capital Group is one of the world’s largest investment management organizations and manages more than $2.3 trillion. The company has more than 9,000 associates in 32 offices around the world, and Bhasin leads a group of more than 100 of those employees worldwide.
“One of the main goals for my career has been to play a role developing long-term strategies, building teams, growing people and driving change in businesses through the use of data, analytics and technology,” said Bhasin, who graduated from Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies with a bachelor of science in information management and technology in 1994.
“My current role as a senior business leader in Capital Group has allowed me to play a critical role meeting these career goals,” he added.
Before coming to Capital Group, Bhasin worked in various roles at JP Morgan Chase over eight years and most recently as a senior vice president, managing director and head of customer, marketing and digital analytics at JP Morgan Chase based in Wilmington, Del.
Bhasin grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, but his work has taken him all over the globe. After graduating from Syracuse, he spent time working in Europe, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore across the financial services, telecommunications and government sectors.
In 2014, Bhasin was recruited to move to Los Angeles to build and run a data and analytics function within Capital Group. Moving to the west coast came with some incredible perks – warm weather, amazing restaurants, great sports teams and a lot of outdoor activities.
Bhasin lives there with his wife, Rozelle, their dog Otis and two of his high school-aged children, Nikhil and Maya. His oldest son, Ajay, recently started at Syracuse University and will be the class of 2027 in the Newhouse School of Public Communications.
“I am so proud he chose to go to SU. Hopefully he will dual major with the iSchool or at least take some classes there,” Bhasin said.
Choosing Syracuse
Bhasin chose to go to Syracuse after one of his cousins, who was a junior at the university, gave him a tour of campus and talked about her time studying abroad in Florence, Italy.
“She shared her experiences, which showed me the potential Syracuse could offer me,” he said. “I had another cousin who decided to attend Syracuse and was in the same graduating class as me. The idea of having family at school made the change more comfortable.”
Bhasin loved Syracuse’s sports teams, especially basketball and football, but the university’s new iSchool was a major draw for him.
“It was a program ahead of its time. It’s amazing to see how the field of data, data science and analytics has grown since I attended,” he said. “It has evolved a lot since I was there, but the curriculum and projects I worked on got me interested in how data can be used across businesses and just starting to think about the potential impacts to business outcomes.”
If he could offer advice to current Syracuse students, Bhasin would encourage them to get summer internships, take classes in the rapidly growing field of data science and learn about generative artificial intelligence, which he predicts will disrupt most industries and provide plentiful jobs for students interested in AI.
As he reflects on his time at the university, Bhasin is grateful for the people who mentored him, especially professor emerita Susan Bonzi and professor emeritus Robert Heckman. He is also looking ahead to achieving some personal goals in his life, such as retiring young enough to travel more with loved ones and learning more about cooking and different cuisines of the world.
He also hopes to join the board of charities in the Los Angeles area and give back to the community that has welcomed him.