Movers And Shakers Of The Week [18-23 Feb]

We bring to you the latest edition of Movers and Shakers of this week.

This week in the Indian startup ecosystem reports surfaced that MobiKwik’s chief strategy officer Mrinal Sinha has put in his papers a couple of weeks ago. It was reported that Sinha is currently serving notice period and would relieve by the end of March 2019. However, no such official confirmation was available.

Here’s a look at other movers and shakers of the week.

Neeraj Aggarwal Joins Binny Bansal’s Xto10X

Former Flipkart and Cure.fit executive Neeraj Aggarwal has joined Binny Bansal’s new venture Xto10X as cofounder and chief operating officer.

In the last eight years, Aggarwal has worked with leading Indian startups like Ola, Flipkart and Cure.fit. During his two-year stint at healthtech startup Cure.fit, he was managing the food vertical — Eat.fit and prior to that, at Flipkart, he played a key role in scaling the company’s supply chain capabilities through Ekart.

He has also worked at tech giants like Oracle, Satyam, and Capgemini.

In his new role, he will make fundamental contributions to building the company across offerings — products, services, and learning.

PayU India Gets New CEO Anirban Mukherjee

Online payments provider PayU has appointed new chief executive for India, Anirban Mukherjee. He will be reporting to Laurent Le Moal, CEO, PayU Global.

Mukherjee comes with more than two decades of experience in global financial services and fintech sector with deep experiences across US, India and APAC in payments, lending and banking. Prior to PayU, Mukherjee was part of the leadership team at Jio, where he drove payments, merchant services, and digital financial services, serving as the co-CEO of Reliance Payments Solution Ltd.

Prior to Jio, he worked with Standard Chartered Bank in India and APAC and with CapitalOne as a senior executive leader in the US.

In his new role, Mukherjee will be responsible for all the operations and business lines of PayU India. In addition, he will identify investment opportunities to build out Naspers’ fintech ambitions, helping these companies scale by leveraging existing assets and infrastructure.

He will also lead PayU into new fintech product categories that are aligned with PayU’s global strategy, such as remittances and credit.

Suresh Vasudevan Joins Paytm Money As CTO

Indian digital payments giant Paytm has appointed Suresh Vasudevan as the chief technology officer for its mutual funds offering, Paytm Money. He will be leading the overall engineering and technology functions at Paytm Money and will be based out of Bengaluru.

Vasudevan comes with more than 20 years of experience in product development for various startups and enterprise product companies across payments, ecommerce and fintech domains. He has also worked at Amazon as the Head of Engineering for Alexa Skills Certification platform.

In the past, he has worked as VP Engineering at Unicel Technologies and held leadership roles at Sify and mChek.

In his new role, Vasudevan will also be working on building Data Science and AI capabilities for Paytm Money as it continues focusing on automating the platform and building robo-advisory based investment products to ease the investment advice and decision-making process for its users.

NPCI Makes Key Leadership Appointments

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has appointed Praveena Rai as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Arif Khan as Chief Digital Officer (CDO).

Praveena Rai comes with over two decades of experience in retail banking, cards, wholesale and commercial banking after having worked with companies like KMBL, HSBC and Citibank. In her last role, she was working as head of cash management for Kotak Bank.

In her new role, Rai will be in-charge of formulating and deploying the marketing, business development, product management and operations strategy in line with NPCI’s overall strategic objectives of simple, secure and seamless consumer experience to further the cause of rapid digitalisation of India. She will drive product penetration, reach and visibility of NPCI’s offerings through suitable partnerships.

Arif Khan has more than 15 years of experiences and was instrumental in driving strategic initiatives in payments, digital banking and financial inclusion at HDFC Bank. He has key experience in the product management, business development and delivering innovative business and technology solutions.

He was earlier working with Razorpay as chief innovation officer. In his new role, Khan will  be leading strategic planning for digital transformation. The role is aimed at growing NPCI’s new products portfolio basis customer needs and industry trends. Khan will be responsible for driving innovation, analytics and technology.

Stay tuned for the next week’s edition of Movers and Shakers of the week!