BharatPe Group appoints former Razorpay SVP as CTO
Group has appointed Pankaj Goel, former Head of Payments Engineering at , as its new Chief Technology Officer (CTO).
Goel will be reporting to Nalin Negi, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and interim CEO at BharatPe, and lead the technology team at the fintech. Prior to Razorpay, he was with software company Intuit for 10 years besides working with Trilogy and Sun Microsystems across product roles.
Goel’s appointment comes seven months after Vijay Aggarwal resigned from the post of CTO, in November 2022.
The Tiger Global-backed startup has seen an exodus of top-level leadership over the last 12 months, including co-founders Satyam Nathani and Bhavik Koladiya, Suhail Sameer (CEO), Nishit Sharma (CRO), Geetanshu Singla (VP, Technology), Nehul Malhotra (PostPe head), and Rajat Jain (CPO, lending and consumer products).
However, BharatPe has been realigning its leadership team since the start of 2023.
It recently looped in former ICICI Bank veteran Sandeep Indurkar as its Chief Business Officer-Banking and Alliances; Aparna Kuppuswamy as its Chief Risk Officer; and Kohinoor Biswas as the Head of Consumer Lending business. In search of a CEO, the company had also appointed risk and compliance expert Rahul Bhatia as Head of Internal Audit, and banking industry veteran Ravinder Oberoi as Head of Compliance, in January.
“With a seasoned engineering leader like Pankaj joining the team, we are confident that we will be able to build best-in-class fintech products that will further enable the next level of growth for the BharatPe Group of Companies,” said CFO and interim CEO Nalin Negi.
Goel added, “As digital becomes more mainstream, I believe there is a huge opportunity for fintech companies to enable the next level of growth story for merchants as well as make an impactful contribution to the overall India growth story. I am hoping that we will deliver impactful solutions that will enable us to not only solve existing problems, but also help us stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly evolving fintech landscape.”
Founded in 2018, BharatPe claims to serve one crore merchants, processing over 300 million UPI transactions per month (with annualised Transaction Processed Value of over $24 billion).
The company said it has disbursed loans worth Rs 100 billion. It raised a total of over $583 million in equity from investors, including Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investment Group, Steadfast Capital, Coatue Management, Ribbit Capital, Insight Partners, Steadview Capital, Beenext, Amplo, and Sequoia.
