Yahoo hired Tapan Bhat as president and GM of Yahoo Finance to oversee its financial and business vertical — marking the seasoned exec’s return to the internet media company after more than a decade.
Bhat will report directly to Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone. He starts at the company May 16 and will be based in San Jose, Calif.
Most recently, Bhat spent the last three years advising startups and their boards. Before that, he was chief product officer at NerdWallet, heading product and engineering, design, data, revenue and partnerships for the personal finance website. He also served as chief product officer at Realtor.com, a division of News Corp. Bhat, and has held senior roles at Adobe Systems and Intuit.
Verizon Media sold Yahoo last year for $5 billion to private-equity firm Apollo Group. From 2005-10, when Yahoo was an independent company, Bhat served as Yahoo’s SVP of consumer, where he led the transformation of yahoo.com from a static page of links to a portal featuring news, email previews and video. He also opened up Yahoo’s homepage to third-party content, and has part of that Bhat developed Yahoo Buzz which provided real-time highlights of the most popular articles from external sites. While at Yahoo, Bhat also developed Yahoo Glue, a universal search experience, and increased the company’s market share internationally.
“We are thrilled to welcome back Tapan, whose experience in building and scaling consumer products, including within the finance category, will help us accelerate innovation across Yahoo Finance’s offerings for years to come,” Lanzone, formerly head of Tinder and CBS Interactive, said in a statement. “Tapan also has a unique history with the Yahoo brand, spending many years leading some of the most important products in the company’s history, and is returning to his roots to help us drive a new era of growth.”
Bhat commented, “Coming back to Yahoo after all these years is exciting because it’s a completely new company… I look forward to being part of this next chapter of Yahoo’s journey as we develop new products and services that will shape the future of consumer finance and investing.”
Bhat holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Michigan and an MBA in marketing from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
Yahoo says it reaches an audience of nearly 900 million people worldwide. In addition to Yahoo Finance, its brands include AOL, Engadget, TechCrunch, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Fantasy and Yahoo Mail.
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