Razorpay announced appointment of New CIO and CBO

Razorpay announced appointment of Amitabh Tewary and Rahul Kothari to its team, as their Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) and Chief Business Officer (CBO), respectively.

The Former Mastercard Vice President, Amitabh Tewary, will be responsible for expanding Razorpay’s footprint in other key markets and accelerating the adoption of new payment and banking platforms and products. A veteran in the space, he will be playing a key role in leading engagement with banks, networks, regulators, and strategic partners to drive innovation at Razorpay.

At Mastercard, as a Vice President, Amitabh worked across a spectrum of roles driving strategic initiatives and partnerships, customer economics and enterprise risk management among others, for nearly a decade. Prior to this, he spearheaded different projects across business strategy, finance, sales, marketing and regulatory management, helping companies such as SBI Card, Thomas Cook and an edu-tech startup to identify new business opportunities and develop new technical capabilities.

Rahul Kothari who joins as CBO will be responsible for growing the company globally as a full-stack B2B Fintech platform by adhering to the company’s vision to power the entire financial ecosystem for partner businesses. In the last sixteen years, Rahul worked on building new products and growing revenue lines for technology-led businesses, and has demonstrated strong product management, and strategic and operational leadership.

Rahul joins from PayU India where he was the Chief Business Officer for Enterprise payments. For three-and-a-half years with the company, he played a prominent role in growing and making the payments business profitable. Before PayU, Rahul contributed to the likes of WNS Global Services, The Boston Consulting Group and Symantec, by benchmarking and improving product performance, and enabling sales and leadership teams to implement successful business strategies.

Welcoming Amitabh and Rahul on board, Harshil Mathur, CEO and Co-founder, Razorpay said, “The ecosystem is at its exciting best at the moment and the timing could not have been better to add two of the sharpest minds in the fintech industry to our team. They both come with varied skill-sets and expertise, and we look forward to creating valuable and differentiated products in the fintech space, together. Razorpay has been charting exponential growth in the last couple of years. With a 500% growth in the last twelve months, we will continue to power disruptive businesses with intelligent technology and excited to have Amitabh and Rahul join us to support this mission.”

With a keen interest and sound connect in the fintech startup world, Amitabh Tewary, Chief Innovation Officer, Razorpay said, “The fintech ecosystem in India is storied and celebrated globally, proof of which is the deep trust exhibited by local and global investors in the form of significant investments over the last decade. This story of innovation and disruption is likely to continue and grow stronger. Razorpay is amongst the most respected Indian fintech companies with an excellent culture which has already proved its mettle in the payments business. I look forward to an exciting association with Razorpay so we can together build a large franchise globally with cutting edge neo banking products.”

“Fintech ecosystem and fintech innovations in India have come a long way, especially in the last five years,” said Rahul Kothari, Chief Business Officer, Razorpay. “However, most of these innovations are in consumer payments. There's a lot of scope for interesting innovations in business payments, something that Razorpay has also been working on. I am passionate about simplifying banking and payments, making intelligent technology easily accessible to businesses and therefore I echo with Razorpay’s vision of revolutionising payments and banking through a single platform. It was impossible for me to not notice the energy and ambition driving Razorpay team to work towards this vision and I wanted to be part of this journey.”

Razorpay currently powers digital payments for 3,50,000 businesses like IRCTC, Airtel, BookMyShow, Zomato, Swiggy, Yatra and Zerodha, among others and plans to increase this to 450,000 by 2020. This converged payments solution company expects a 5x growth in its revenue by the end of the next fiscal year.