Brands
Pine Labs appoints Shalini Pillai as CMO
Former Microsoft marketing director to steer global brand
MUMBAI: Fintech platform Pine Labs has named Shalini Pillai as its new chief marketing officer, handing her the reins of global marketing, product marketing, marcom and brand positioning as the company sharpens its worldwide ambitions.
Pillai joins from Microsoft, where she served as marketing director for India and South Asia. Her career reads like a tour of modern tech marketing. At Google, she led consumer apps marketing in India, steered GPay and new business initiatives marketing, and earlier drove growth across the India SMB segment. Long before big tech, she co-founded BrandIdea Consultancy, building tools for market planning and ROI analytics, and began her journey at Coca-Cola India in sales and brand roles.
An MBA from the Indian School of Business, Pillai brings more than two decades of experience spanning boardrooms and bootstraps, B2C buzz and B2B backbone.
Announcing the appointment, Pine Labs chief executive B. Amrish Rau said Pillai’s technology-led marketing pedigree and data-driven approach make her well placed to lead the company’s next chapter of transformation and growth. He noted her track record in scaling digital products and building integrated brand and product engines across global markets.
For her part, Pillai sees fintech’s future in seamless infrastructure. She described Pine Labs as sitting at the crossroads of merchant relationships and sovereign-scale technology, turning consumer intent into instant execution. Her mandate is clear: craft an integrated market strategy and expand the company’s footprint to deliver compounding commercial value worldwide.
The move comes as Pine Labs doubles down on artificial intelligence across its payments stack and developer tools, and deepens its collaboration with OpenAI. With a seasoned marketer now at the helm, the company appears ready to tell its next growth story with sharper focus and a louder voice.
Brands
Uidai partners with Google to help users locate Aadhaar centres
Verified Aadhaar centres to appear on Maps with services and access info
MUMBAI: Finding an Aadhaar centre may soon be as easy as finding your favourite café. In a move aimed at making public services more accessible, the Unique Identification Authority of India has partnered with Google to display authorised Aadhaar centres on Google Maps. The feature, expected to roll out in the coming months, will allow residents to locate verified centres quickly and confidently.
More than 60,000 Aadhaar centres, including state of the art Aadhaar Seva Kendras, will be mapped. When users search on Google Maps, they will be directed to authorised facilities rather than unverified listings, helping curb misinformation and confusion.
The listings will do more than drop a pin. Users will be able to see the nature of services offered at each centre, whether it is adult enrolment, child enrolment, or limited to address and mobile number updates. Details such as operating hours, parking availability and divyang friendly infrastructure will also be shown wherever applicable.
Uidai CEO Bhuvnesh Kumar, said the collaboration is part of the authority’s continued effort to improve ease of living for Aadhaar holders by making authorised centres simpler and faster to navigate.
The partnership will deepen in its next phase, with Uidai using Google Business Profile to manage information and respond directly to public feedback. Looking ahead, the two organisations are also exploring the option of enabling appointment bookings through the Google Maps interface, potentially allowing residents to plan their visits with greater efficiency.
Google India country head, strategic partnerships Roli Agarwal, said integrating verified Aadhaar centres would help millions access trusted services with confidence, bringing essential government infrastructure closer to the people who need it most.
If all goes to plan, a routine Aadhaar update may soon begin not with a queue, but with a search bar.
