Nalin is a Product & Business Strategy Professional with a rich experience of 20+ years on global assignments covering Technology, Telecom & Payments domain.

He has spearheaded the launch of many initiatives in the telecom and payments business and incubated new age payment solutions with organizations like Airtel, MasterCard and NPCI. He has also been an advisor to multiple start-ups for their go-to-market strategy.

He started his career with Bharti Airtel in 2001 and was a part of the India’s telecom revolution. He had been responsible for spearheading some key projects for Airtel which included Strategic outsourcing, Telecom roll outs, Tower cost optimization and GIS based Market planning. Later as part of the principal team at Bharti group he evaluated and executed projects in new areas like DTH, Mobile wallets and International acquisitions. At MasterCard he led the product launch for and their Bill Payments platform in India.

Presently he is serving as Chief of Corporate Business and Key Initiatives at National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). Under his leadership, NPCI was able to swiftly launch the prestigious Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) platform for Reserve Bank of India (RBI), National Common Mobility Card (NCMC) for Transit operators and Smart Cities and rolled out solutions in the area of Contactless Payments, Secure Online Commerce and Tokenization.

At NPCI, he has been contributed extensively in building the ecosystem of payments enabling Governments, Corporates, Merchants, MSMEs and driving consumption for consumers in all segments. In his current role he is tasked to set up partnerships to drive new use cases for Fintech, Startups & Merchants not just in payments but also in areas of loyalty, analytics and identification.

Nalin is a Communications engineer from University of Pune and holds a Master’s degree in Diploma (Strategy) in Business Management from FORE, Delhi.

Radhika Binani ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/radhika-binani/ ) is a consummate professional with over 16 years of work experience across organizations such as Unilever, Citibank, Michael & Susan Dell foundation and currently at Policybazaar Group.

She is currently the Chief Product Officer of Paisabazaar.com – India’s largest online marketplace for financial products. Radhika has built her expertise over these years as a customer-centric, analytics oriented, implementation focused business professional.

Under Radhika’s functional leadership, Paisabazaar.com has registered explosive growth over the last 5 years, witnessing a growth of over 155X. Currently, Paisabazaar.com is the only independent online platform in India to disburse USD 1 billion of loans on an annualized basis.

Since its inception in February 2014, paisabazaar.com has been on a transformational journey to make personal finance decisions easy, transparent and convenient for customers – designing and launching customized digital solutions enabled by customer-centric product design, rigorous data science based algorithms, to help target the right customer profiles.

Radhika has been instrumental in creating a robust digital platform that has enabled the organization’s growth.

• Driving Credit Awareness: Paisabazaar’s objective is to help each customer achieve a high credit score and lead a healthy financial life. Being the first market player to offer ‘Free credit Score’ to enable millions of Indians to be credit score aware, Radhika has continuously innovated and built a robust platform. The platform covers all 3 key aspects to credit score management – checking, tracking and building. She has enabled free and instant check of one’s credit score from multiple credit bureaus, tracking of the score can be done seamlessly through WhatsApp, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. A chat-based service has been built to help customer build score.
• ‘Chances of Approval’ for each customer:Radhika realized that when a customer is looking for a loan, ‘will my loan get approved’ is the top most question on her mind. To address this customer need, she built a ‘chances of approval’ score with every bank offer. As soon as a customer visits the site, a ‘Chance of approval’ score is generated based on customer demographics, bank’s approval data and customer’s credit worthiness. This helps customers be directed to the right bank and help her avail loan in a frictionless manner.
• Paperless process:Riding on the Indian Government’s ‘India Stack’ initiative that aims to digitize customer identification and verification, Paisabazaar.com has developed solutions where processes are completed on its platform without the need for customers to either visit banks or do multiple sheets of paperwork. Paisabazaar.com works with over 90 financial institutions to ensure customers always have the best product and widest choice available to them. All of these institutions have integrations with Paisabazaar to enable instant

These have helped Paisabazaar to become India’s largest aggregator platform for Banking products (loans, credit cards, savings) in less than 3 years, beating older and well-established incumbents

• Achieve $1bn annualized disbursal run-rate
• Have~20M visits on Paisabazaar.com site per month with ~2M users benefitting from comparison and advice per month
• Won ‘Best Fintech Brand’ 2018, ‘Best Digital Platform for Credit Cards’ 2017 and ‘Best BFSI Brand’ 2016 by The Economic Times

Radhika’s contributions to the fintech and financial services space has been recognized by several forums including the Women Leadership Achievement Award in 2017 which identifies and celebrates the outstanding leadership and achievements by women leaders. Some of her significant achievements include:

• Her work has straddled across the customer pyramid: HNIs at Citibank, delivering financial products to the bottom of the pyramid through her work at Michael & Susan dell foundation and the middle of the pyramid at Paisabazaar.com.  She has carried her learnings and applied them effortlessly across each of these segments and delivered value to the organizations that she has been a part of.
• Radhika has established herself as one of the most influential and prominent fintech leaders. She has managed to deliver in the fast-paced and demanding environment of a start-up.
• She has built a strong digital product and technology capability in the organization. She was the only Product manager in 2016. Now has a team of 20+ strong product managers in the organization with established product roadmaps, implementation processes and business-aligned metrics.

Anju is the President and co-founder of IvyCamp (A global IIT/IIM Alumni-based initiative of IvyCap Ventures) that leverages the Alumni Ecosystem to help founders enhance their skills, accelerate their businesses, engage in corporate innovation programs, and connect with investors. Anju focuses on working with founders to explore their potential to the fullest through mentoring, corporate engagements, accelerator programs, and more. She is strongly committed to helping build out the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Anju is an IITD and Stanford Alumnus. She has over 15 years of experience in product management and marketing in the financial software industry. After her Ph.D. at Stanford, she worked in several roles at Risk Management Solutions Inc., in California, the leading provider of catastrophe risk models for the global re/insurance industry. Her roles included building risk assessment models for earthquakes, leading RMS’s first ASP weather derivatives product, leading the product management team for RMS’s core catastrophe software product, and helping to lay the groundwork for RMS’s next-generation modeling platform. 

She has authored many publications in catastrophe risk management. She has worked on projects with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Office of Emergency Services, PG&E, Insurance companies, and risk managers in the commercial sector in the USA.

Yogender is responsible for leading the business growth and innovation at Carzonrent, India’s leading mobility solutions provider for personal ground transportation for corporate and retail clients. A computer engineer by training, he has over 19 years of work experience spanning across multiple technologies and various industries. At Carzonrent, leveraging cutting-edge technology, they are creating a global leader in the sustainable and innovative mobility solutions space.

Dr. Shashank Sinha, has always wanted to contribute positively towards the welfare of animals which made him take up veterinary studies and become a veterinarian. He calls himself a pet lover first, then a doctor, followed by a CEO.

A veterinarian by profession and an IIM alumni, he is a strong business leader with 14+ years of diverse and rich experience in Retail, FMCG & Agriculture. He is an extremely passionate, result-oriented and seasoned retail professional. Dr. Sinha’s exemplary business acumen helped the brand garner a 38% market share in the Indian pet food industry. His visionary leadership has taken the brand to a global platform and Drools has now spread its footprint across 18+ countries and is now aiming to take it up to 30+ countries within the next year, where south-east Asia and Russia will be the key focus.

He is an inspiration to many pursuing veterinarians who now understand that careers are not just restricted to being practitioners but also a CEO of leading MNC.

Realizing the gap in the Indian market has always made him want to give back to the ecosystem that help flourish his career. He has initiated multiple programs for students, mentors and veterinarians to encourage them build their career path.

Venkataramani Prakash is a thought leader in the payments and cross border remittance space. And has worked extensively towards easing up cross border payments out of India. Prakash currently oversees payments strategy in India for Flywire. Before that Prakash has had extensive leadership stints in EBIXCASH and Thomas Cook. Prakash’s papers around evolving payments eco-system globally have been published in Journal of payment strategy and systems and Times of India. Prakash has been endorsed as a Global Talent by UK catalyst body Tech Nation (affiliated to the UK government).Prakash interests spans across card issuance,cross border payments and settlements and foreign exchange.

Prayag is passionate about investing and scaling consumer businesses. He has been investing in the early-stage ecosystem since 2013, and been involved as an investor with BiryaniByKilo, Bluestone, and Vinculum. 

He has been a Principal at IvyCap Ventures where he focused on consumer and enterprise technology startups. He has been an Investment Banker with SBI Capital Markets, as well as a software developer for Infosys Technologies.

At Fireside, Prayag works closely with MamaEarth, AlphaVector, Yogabar, Slurrp Farm, Wellbeing Nutrition, Smytten, and The Bakers Dozen.

Prayag holds an MBA from XIMB and a BE(Computer) from Pune University. 

Over 20 years, Abhinav has been instrumental in setting up new businesses and scaling them up.  

Abhinav joined Kaapi Machines in November 2017 and since then has been the force driving the growth of several new age coffee equipments in India.  

A true visionary in the coffee industry, Abhinav, over the years, elevated the company from a pureplay equipment supplier to a full-service coffee consulting, innovation and community-leading organization. During his leadership, the company launched several new-age coffee equipment in India such as Ripple Maker, PuqPress, Brood Nitro-Coffee and La Marzocco Modbar, with the purpose of elevating the coffee brewing and consumption experience. The brand is also providing consulting, training and other services to top coffee businesses like McCafe, Starbucks, Slay Coffee, Third Wave Coffee Roasters, Araku Coffee and many more.    

Passionate about promoting and enabling fresh and good coffee to all coffee lovers, Abhinav started India’s first ecommerce portal for all things coffee – Something’s Brewing in Year 2020. The home brewers community took to the brand instantly due to a one stop solution for all things coffee under one platform, meetsups and events. 

In the vast career spanning 18+ years, Abhinav has performed various roles in the product, marketing, key account management, operations and sales & distribution, working in diverse sectors including Consumer Durables and FMCG. He started his career with Wipro Lighting as an Area Manager and then moved to Philips, setting up a new Trade Marketing function with a focus towards Modern Retail. He worked for Stanley Black & Decker, setting up its Modern Retail, Ecommerce and consumer business before moving to Indulge Beverages, a start-up into the coffee capsule space. Prior to his stint at Kaapi Machines, Abhinav was the Vice President at Stovekraft in Bangalore where he oversaw product, marketing, modern retail, and e-commerce functions for the company.  

For him ‘dreaming big’ means to make Kaapi Machines India’s Premier Coffee Equipments Company. 

Overall, with a rich experience of 15years in sales and marketing, Abhinav wants to continue setting up growth-driven businesses and initiatives.  

He has earned an MBA degree in Marketing and Operations from XLRI, Jamshedpur.  

Arjun Vaidya is the Founder at Dr. Vaidya’s: New Age Ayurveda. Prior to his entrepreneurial stint, Arjun graduated from Brown University, USA with a BA with honors in International Relations and Economics. He then worked in private equity at a consumer sector focused fund, L Capital Asia (the private equity arm of the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy Group) where he focused specifically on consumer brands and consumer tech.

In October 2016, Arjun quit his job to take on his 150-year-old family legacy of Ayurvedic formulations that his grandfather left behind. Dr. Vaidya’s repackaged the ancient Indian science of Ayurveda and emerged as India’s largest Ayurveda brand online. The brand successfully reached 2m+ consumers across 500+ cities and 16,500+ pin codes in India. Arjun was the first Ayurvedic Entrepreneur to be featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia List for and Business World 40 Under 40 List! Dr. Vaidya’s also won Youth SMB of the Year from Amazon and the Retail Startup Award from the Retailers Association of India. In June 2019, Dr. Vaidya’s partnered with the USD 4b RP Sanjiv Goenka Group and has now been acquired by the group – making it one of India’s first successful D2C exits.

Currently, Arjun leads venture investing for Verlinvest ((one of the world’s largest consumer brand focused funds) in India through a new fund called V3 Ventures. Here he focusses on investing in early-stage consumer facing businesses. He is also an active angel investor (with 80+ portfolio companies) and a mentor to brands in India’s D2C and ecommerce ecosystem.

Outside of work, Arjun hosts a podcast called ‘Direct to A Billion Consumers’ and one of India’s largest cohort-based courses on D2C. He is also a World Economic Forum Global Shaper and a member of Brown University’s Young Alumni Advisory Council.

Being a firm believer in the impact of communication, raising awareness, and education being the foundation of change, Mehul Manjeshwar has always been passionate about sustainability. Mehul completed his MBA in the field which has enabled him to distinguish between environmentally friendly practices and those that harm the environment, and has taught him how to encourage businesses, individuals and households to adopt behaviours that preserve our planet for future generations. Mehul is a Climate Reality Leader having had the opportunity to be trained during the Climate Reality Leadership Corps with former Vice President Al Gore among other knowledgeable experts in the sustainability field.

Currently, he works as the Chief Marketing and Sustainability Communications Officer at Bare Necessities Zero Waste Solutions, contributing to sustainable innovation, marketing authentically to raise awareness of sustainability, and  building  educational platforms to create content that promotes a green lifestyle.

Most recently, Mehul is a Certified Health + Wellness Coach and strongly believes in bridging the gap between our lifestyles and how it can help build a sustainable environment.

Mehul’s work experience as one of the first few employees in a unicorn startup company in Canada has taught him to adapt to a constantly changing environment and understand various aspects of running a successful business. He is excited to engage with organisations that aim for a green future and emphasises environmental sustainability, considering challenges as catalysts for creativity and positive change.