Sarita Gahlot: Architecting the Next-Generation Commission Platform for Wealth Management

Independent broker-dealers are racing to retire decades-old commission engines just as the U.S. wealth-management market braces for an advisor shortage and fresh regulatory pressure. Consultancies say the shift toward advisory—and the need to pay thousands of representatives quickly and transparently—is forcing firms to rebuild payouts on modern, rules-driven systems, often atop low-code or incentive-compensation tools. Into that maelstrom steps Sarita Gahlot, a New Jersey–based program-management specialist who treats legacy ledgers as “living organisms that need clean data, not Band-Aids.”

Profile: Sarita Gahlot’s Track Record

Sarita Gahlot traces her fascination with complex pay cycles to her days guiding Adobe’s move from boxed software to subscriptions. “That pivot taught me that pricing models are strategy in disguise,” she recalls. At Adobe, she received the Global Sales Achievement Award for three consecutive years for her significant contribution to the organization’s yearly revenue growth and leading a team of 10-15 members who demonstrated excellence in their customer acquisition journeys.

Today, at a leading global advisory firm, Sarita Gahlot directs a first-of-its-kind commission-transformation for one of the nation’s largest independent broker-dealers. Phase 1 has already onboarded 3,000 advisors onto a new broker-dealer’s integrated platform; Phase 2 will hand in full compensation management ownership to the broker-dealer, replacing fragmented spreadsheets with a cloud-based incentive-compensation suite. “We are retiring a century’s worth of folklore embedded in macros,” Sarita Gahlot says.

Her prior three-year low-code program for a global fintech giant illustrates the same instincts. By folding client-onboarding, account-maintenance and servicing into one integrated low-code stack the project cut manual hand-offs, giving advisors real-time status views and freeing staff for higher-value work. Her 20 member cross-functional team used Agile sprints, Aha! And Jira road-maps and continuous risk reviews to keep deliverables on track. Similar successful low-code implementations and changing market landscapes helped her firm expand low-code practice from 20 to 150 professionals.

Recognition has followed. In February of 2025 the Indian Achievers Forum (IAF) named Sarita Gahlot a “Women Icon,” adding her to a roster that the IAF positions as celebrating contributions with socio-economic impact and chosen through a multi-stage review. “The award matters to me because it honors execution, not headlines,” she notes.

Inside the Transformation Playbook

Asked how she turns sprawling mandates into repeatable wins, Sarita Gahlot points to three habits:

  • Architect the outcome. “Stakeholders first sketch success on a whiteboard—only then do we discuss tooling,” Sarita Gahlot explains. For a commission transformation project, she would map every commission rule, then layered risk controls and data-lineage checkpoints before recommending a suitable ICM platform to a client.
  • Treat velocity as a metric, not a feeling. Daily stand-ups, Jira dashboards and burn-down charts form a single nervous system. “If a sprint burndown flattens, we know where to look before the week ends,” she says.
  • Scale talent deliberately. Starting with two analysts, she grew the team to 20 by onboarding configurators versed in both finance and low-code. “You cannot paste pure technologists onto payout logic and expect empathy for an advisor’s Friday pay-stub,” Sarita Gahlot observes.

Colleagues credit that blend of empathy and precision for client satisfaction scores above 90 percent and resource-utilization rates worth of 85 percent. Even during the pandemic, Sarita Gahlot’s six-week CARES Act loan-forgiveness portal for a federal agency went live without major alterations, she says, that “agile is less a cadence than a contract of transparency.”

Beyond delivery, Sarita Gahlot mentors emerging managers and advisors through the Project Management Institute and speaks at low-code forums about bridging compliance and product thinking. Her certifications—PMP, CSM, Six Sigma Green Belt and SAP Activate—feed a toolkit she updates quarterly.

Looking Ahead in Wealth Technology

Commission modernization is only one pressure point. Broker-dealer consolidation and rising AuM suggest advisory platforms will need to process far more data while meeting advisors’ expectations for near-instant payouts. Sarita Gahlot predicts that incentive-compensation engines will converge with customer-relationship and portfolio-reporting systems: “Advisors should see the same truth the CFO sees, without exporting CSVs.” Her current roadmap experiments with API gateways that stream commission events to onboarding and risk dashboards in real time.
The broader lesson, she argues, is that digital transformations succeed when program managers translate strategy into backlog items—and when organizations celebrate that craft. Awards such as the Indian Achievers Forum’s Women Icon reinforce the value of disciplined execution, not just disruptive ideas. “Recognition fuels the next initiative,” Sarita Gahlot reflects, “but the real award is watching an advisor’s payout hit exactly when it should.”

As wealth-management firms chase scale, it is practitioners like Sarita Gahlot, fluent in both capital-markets nuance and low-code velocity, who will quietly keep the pipes flowing. Their work may not grab headlines, but investors will notice the difference every time a statement balances to the penny.

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