MAM
Fintech POP appoints Navi’s Pancholi to head engineering
MUMBAI: POP, the fintech startup targeting young Indian consumers, has appointed Chandresh Pancholi as its new head of engineering and product.
Pancholi joins from Navi, where he served as director of engineering, leading a 90-person team that helped propel the company’s UPI payment application from 12th to 4th position in India’s competitive digital payments market.
During his tenure at Navi, he oversaw several key initiatives including the development of a credit line on UPI with Karnataka Bank and a central abuse detection platform for UPI reward systems.
Prior to Navi, Pancholi held technical leadership positions at Paytm and Flipkart, building considerable experience in India’s e-commerce and financial technology sectors.
POP, founded in 2023 by former Flipkart executives, offers a rewards-based payment ecosystem where users earn “POPcoins” worth Rs 1 each for transactions made through its platform. The company is backed by India Quotient and several angel investors from the consumer internet sector.
At POP, Pancholi will be responsible for scaling the company’s technical infrastructure and developing new product features as the startup attempts to challenge established players in India’s increasingly crowded digital payments market.
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.
