BharatPe appoints Ritesh Srivastava as its Chief Data Scientist

Fintech payments platform, BharatPe has roped in former RBI deputy governor B P Kanungo and TARI co-founder Kaushik Dutta as independent directors. The company plans to strengthen governance rigor and transparency as they look forward to a listing on stock exchanges. The company plans a market debut in the next 2-3 years.

Kanungo is expected to work closely with the BharatPe board and support the company in its plan of building a high-quality profitable business. On the other hand, Dutta who has extensive experience in corporate governance --- is said to be key for BharatPe as it plans to go public.

BharatPe CEO Suhail Sameer told PTI, "Business is about to turn profitable in a few months and we are strengthening governance at the company by appointing independent directors."

Sameer stated that BharatPe plans to go public in the next 2-3 years. He believes post-2024 (general) elections should be a good period.

According to the BharatPe CEO, the appointments are in line with the company's aim to build a world-class institution and be the torchbearer of corporate governance in the start-up world.

Kanungo recently worked as the deputy governor of RBI from 2017-2021. He joined the central bank in 1982 and since then has looked into various departments of RBI such as information technology, payment and settlement systems, foreign exchange, and internal debt management. He has more than 40 years of experience.

Meanwhile, Dutta is the co-founder of Thought Arbitrage Research Institute (TARI). He is also currently the chairman and independent director of the online food delivery company, Zomato. He has worked with major firms like Zomato, Policy Bazaar, HCL Infosystems, Newgen Software, NDTV, and Snapdeal.

TARI is a multi-disciplinary research think tank with over 200 person-years experience in defining public policies and their implementation.

At present, BharatPe has nine directors on its board. The co-founder stated that they are looking to have at least one-third of the directors as independent directors.

Sameer along with co-founder Shashvat Nakrani is also on the board as executive director. Meanwhile, former SBI chairman Rajnish Kumar chairs the board.

Apart from the appointment of Kanungo and Dutta, in line with BharatPe's plan for having a Board with at least one-third of independent directors, Kewal Handa resigned from the Board, however, will continue to support the Board and the Management in an advisory capacity.

Rajnish Kumar stated that "earlier this year, we had put in place a robust governance framework and were in the process of identifying the right leaders who could join the Board in building BharatPe 2.0," reported PTI.

Kumar added that the recent important appointments are driven by this very thought and "we hope that the composition of Board, processes, and compliances in place will lead to best governance practices in the industry."

BharatPe empowers shop owners to accept payments from any payment app for FREE. It makes payment acceptance simple by offering merchants a single QR to accept all payment apps such as Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay, BHIM, and 150+ other UPI apps.

The company aspires to be the one-stop business utility app for offline merchants in India.