Comviva appoints Sanjiv Patankar to lead global FinTech business

MUMBAI: Comviva is putting a new hand on the fintech wheel, appointing Sanjiv Patankar to steer its global financial services business.

Patankar has been named Product Unit Head of Comviva’s FinTech business, which spans digital wallets and payments, payment orchestration, embedded finance and tokenisation. He will be responsible for driving global growth, product innovation and expansion in developed markets, while deepening relationships with customers and ecosystem partners.

Patankar brings more than 28 years of global leadership experience across fintech, digital payments, banking technology, mobility, software products and enterprise-wide digital transformation.

He joins Comviva from Giesecke+Devrient (G+D) ePayments, where he spent eight years overseeing its global ePayments product portfolio. His remit covered digital wallets, tokenisation, digital identity, authentication and next-generation payment solutions.

During his time at G+D, Patankar led initiatives focused on product expansion, innovation and global customer engagement, contributing to the growth and market positioning of its ePayments business.

At Comviva, his focus will extend across digital payments and embedded finance as the company looks to build out its next-generation financial services portfolio. The company said the convergence of payments, embedded finance, digital identity and AI is creating new opportunities for its fintech business.

Rajesh Chandiramani, Chief Executive Officer, Comviva, said Patankar’s experience across digital payments, product innovation and global markets would support the company’s plans to scale its fintech business and expand its presence across the digital financial services ecosystem.

Patankar said the next phase of digital financial services would increasingly bring together intelligent technology, payments and embedded experiences. He pointed to AI and tokenisation as technologies that could help move financial platforms beyond transaction-led services towards more connected ecosystems.

The appointment comes as Comviva’s existing fintech business operates at considerable scale. Its mobiquity Pay platform is deployed across more than 50 countries and has more than 500 million registered customers across over 70 deployments.

The platform processes around half a trillion dollars annually, while Comviva is also expanding its digital commerce and merchant payments capabilities through strategic partnerships and payment orchestration solutions.

With Patankar now at the helm of the FinTech unit, Comviva is looking to turn that existing scale into its next growth phase with payments, embedded finance and emerging technologies increasingly sharing the same financial playground.