MAM
Mohit Hira appointed as IBT Media President & Country Head of India
MUMBAI: IBT Media India has appointed Mohit Hira as President & Country Head of its India operations.
IBT Media’s Indian edition (www.ibtimes.co.in) is headquarted in Bengaluru and led by Chandra Mohan, Managing Director, has been operational since 2011.
“Hira’s mandate is to create a brand out of a well-built product with market-facing initiatives and content reinforcement” added Mohan. The site claims that it is engineered by IB Times’ global team, and has seen rapid growth in recent years. It is also well supported by advertisers. Apart from business news, technology, entertainment, sports and politics from India and the world constitute the news lineup in the India edition.
IB Times MD Dev Pragad said, “We were very impressed by Mohit’s deep understanding of digital publishing. His background from advertising to publishing puts him in the perfect position to take IBT Media in India to the next level. We look forward to working very closely with him”.
“IB Times presents a unique opportunity to take a popular digital destination to the next level. In my interactions with Dev and Mohan, their infectious start-up attitude convinced me of the opportunity to leverage my experience. The website is rich in content and is engineered for on-the-go readers who need credible updates on business news through the day. Now it’s time to turn it into a consumer-facing brand and socialise it,” said Mohit Hira.
In his last assignment, Mohit Hira was Chief Executive & Publisher of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka owned Open Media Network which publishes Open Magazine. Hira was also responsible for re launching Open’s website, strengthening its sales team and repositioning the brand.Before joining Open, he was CEO at Hungama Digital Services (HDS) and Digital Head at J. Walter Thompson India, as well as Regional Business Head on the Airtel account. Hira had joined JWT from NIIT, where he was President of its B2C global online learning business that he had started. He was also the Chief Marketing Officer for NIIT’s retail individual training businesses and helped in the founding years of the NIIT University.
As Director-Times Internet Ltd where he was the brand custodian for the group’s website, www.indiatimes.com, he was responsible for incubation, marketing and usability of its portals.Before this, he was the Brand Head of The Economic Times (Delhi) and Navbharat Times at Bennett Coleman. Originally, a copywriter at Contract Advertising’s Kolkata office, Mohit Hira grew to take charge first as Creative Director and then the head of its Kolkata and Delhi offices.
An English (Hons.) graduate of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, Mohit is also an alumnus of Executive Development Programmes at ISB Hyderabad, IIM Ahmedabad and INSEAD Singapore where he was nominated to the Google Academy.
He will continue to be based in Delhi NCR and will work closely with the India and EMEA Managing Directors of IB Times.
MUMBAI: In India’s fast-moving payments race, Visa has just swiped in a new leader. The company has named Suresh Sethi as its India country head, marking a key leadership shift as it sharpens its focus on digital payments growth in the market. Sethi steps into the role following his recent exit from Protean eGov Technologies, where he served as chief executive officer. He succeeds Sandeep Ghosh, who has moved on after more than four years at Visa to pursue an external opportunity.
The appointment comes at a time when Visa is doubling down on its expansion strategy across India and the wider region, deepening partnerships and accelerating adoption in an increasingly competitive digital payments ecosystem.
Sethi brings with him a broad, cross-market perspective shaped by decades of experience across corporate banking, retail financial services, mobile money and large-scale government technology initiatives. He began his career at Citigroup, where he spent 14 years working across India, Africa, South America and the United States, focusing on transaction banking services within the corporate bank.
His appointment signals a blend of institutional experience and market familiarity qualities that could prove critical as Visa navigates a landscape where fintech innovation, regulatory evolution and consumer adoption are all accelerating at once.
As digital payments in India continue to scale rapidly, the leadership change underscores a simple reality, in a market where every tap, scan and swipe counts, who leads the charge can matter just as much as the technology itself.
