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Haptik appoints Mukund Seetharaman as COO
Mumbai: Jio Haptik Technologies Ltd on Wednesday announced the appointment of Mukund Seetharaman as its chief operating officer (COO).
In this role, Seetharaman will be responsible for managing global sales, partnerships, marketing & GTM, customer success and overall P&L of the organisation, said the statement.
Seetharaman has more than 23 years of experience in seeding and scaling businesses across multiple markets. He spent a large portion of his career with global major Wipro, where he started and operated businesses across India, Middle East, UK, Continental Europe and Latin America. A multi-faceted executive, he was responsible for some of the large wins and establishing a strong presence in each of these markets. In his last role with Tech Mahindra, Mukund was the Chief Growth Officer for the Cloud business for EMEA and APJI markets. He is an electronics engineer and an MBA from Symbiosis, Pune.
“I am excited to welcome Mukund to Haptik. He has a proven record of building high performing teams and scaling businesses across multiple continents & markets,” said Haptik co-founder and CEO Aakrit Vaish. “His arrival marks a critical moment in Haptik’s growth journey where we are at an inflection point of unprecedented growth in the marketplace. I am confident that under his leadership, Haptik will mature as an organisation from a startup to a global software powerhouse. With Mukund’s arrival, we have our core leadership now in place and ready to accelerate our journey towards becoming a global leader in the conversational AI economy.”
“I am thrilled to join Aakrit, Swapan, and the rest of the Haptik team at such an amazing time in the company’s evolution,” said Mukund Seetharaman. “Conversational commerce is starting to become a crucial avenue for leading brands to meet their customers wherever they are – from metaverses to phone lines – and giving the best possible experience from acquisition to advocacy. Haptik has already seen incredible momentum: not everyone can boast 500+ million users served with billions of interactions.”
eNews
PNB partners Kiwi to launch credit-enabled UPI for users
Targets 180 million customers; RuPay card offers 0.5 per cent to 1.5 per cent cashback
MUMBAI: Swipe, tap, or scan credit is quietly slipping into the rhythm of everyday payments, and Punjab National Bank wants in on the action. The state-run lender has partnered with Kiwi to roll out credit-enabled UPI payments for its 180 million customers, marking a significant push to blend traditional banking with India’s fast-evolving digital payments ecosystem.
At the centre of the collaboration is the launch of the PNB Kiwi Credit Card on the RuPay network. The card is designed with a digital-first approach, offering fully online onboarding and seamless integration with UPI, allowing users to transact via scan-and-pay while accessing credit.
The offering also brings in a rewards layer, with cashback ranging from 0.5 per cent to 1.5 per cent on online transactions, positioning the product as both a convenience play and a spending incentive.
The move comes as UPI continues to dominate India’s digital payments landscape, increasingly blurring the lines between debit-led transactions and credit access. For PNB, which operates over 10,000 branches around 60 per cent in semi-urban and rural areas, the partnership signals a targeted effort to extend formal credit to segments that have traditionally remained underserved.
The collaboration also reflects a broader industry shift, where banks and fintech platforms are converging to embed credit directly into payment flows, reducing friction while expanding access.
With RuPay credit cards gaining traction and UPI evolving beyond peer-to-peer transfers, the PNB–Kiwi tie-up positions both players at the intersection of scale, accessibility, and the next phase of digital finance in India.
