MAM
Siddhartha Roy is ‘Happy’ COO
MUMBAI: Bangalore-based creative agency Happy has appointed Siddhartha Roy as its first chief operating officer in Siddhartha Roy.
Roy comes in from Phoenix Ogilvy, Sri Lanka where he set up and headed the strategic planning cell and also led account management.
The agency has recently started its Mumbai operations.
As part of his job profile, Roy will be responsible for Happy’s operations across branches. He has over 16 years in the business, of which 10 years were spent with Ogilvy in Mumbai, Bangalore and Sri Lanka. Besides Ogilvy, he has worked with Ambience & Everest as well as loyalty marketing specialists Direm.
Happy co-founder and CEO Kartik Iyer commented, “Praveen and I have done things by ourselves so far. We think it‘s time to take a more structured approach to reach our goals. He comes with the right level of experience combined with the hunger to do the unexpected – this is very much the DNA of Happy. Known as the ‘oldmonkster’ among friends, we think he is the perfect fit as our COO. We welcome him and are very confident this addition will take things to a whole new level. In fact, it already has.”
Roy said, “I think there are seismic changes taking place in the business of communications today. Gone are the days of agency imperialism. While marketers are looking for ‘ideas’, large network agencies are increasingly selling ‘processes’. And over the past few years, Happy has been successfully capitalising on this need-gap. This is the primary reason for me to join the Happy family – and I’m extremely excited about it.”
In his career of 16 years, Roy has been associated with brands across diverse categories like FMCG (Cadbury, ITC Foods, Nestle, Coke and Ceylon Tobacco Company), Telecom (Hutch/Vodafone, Reliance and Sri Lanka Telecom), Web (Yahoo) and Retail (Madura Garments).
Five-year-old Happy is responsible for the Flipkart campaigns featuring little kids which have been widely appreciated by the audiences and award juries. The agency also has a role to play in the ‘Lee – Never Wasted’ shopping bag design which has won them a Cannes nomination. Its other piece of work was the Incredible India tourism commercial titled the ‘post card’.
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.
