MobiKwik appoints three business heads amid reports of top-level exits

Digital payments firm MobiKwik has beefed up its top deck by appointing business heads for three different verticals.

In a statement, Gurugram-based MobiKwik said that former OLX executive Deepak Batra will head its online business, former Reckitt Benckiser executive Jalaj Khurana has joined as head of the unorganised retail vertical, while former Credit Suisse executive Chandan Joshi will look after organised retail.

“The hiring of the three business heads is in line with our business strategy,” said Upasana Taku, co-founder and director of MobiKwik. 

The fresh appointments come amid reports of top-level exits at MobiKwik. Last month, The Economic Times had reported that  Daman Soni, who was heading marketing and growth for the digital payments vertical, had resigned.

Earlier on Tuesday, Entrackr reported that MobiKwik’s chief risk officer Puneet Agarwal had put in his papers last week. It also stated that chief business officer Vineet Singh had resigned in April this year.

Fresh hires

An Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi and INSEAD alumnus, Batra was the director of OLX’s real estate vertical. He also had stints at consulting firm Bain & Co and social networking giant Facebook.  

A graduate of Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta, Khurana served as the brand manager for some of Reckitt Benckiser’s FMCG products that include Dettol and Dermicool. Before that, he worked at Dabur India. 

Joshi is an MBA from London Business School and earlier worked at financial services firm Future First.

MobiKwik

MobiKwik, run by One MobiKwik Systems Pvt. Ltd, was founded in 2009 by the husband-wife duo Bipin Preet Singh and Upasana Taku. It claims to have a network of more than 1.5 million direct merchants and more than 55 million users. 

It has thus far raised about $115 million in external funding from investors such as Sequoia Capital, Net1, Tree Line Asia, Cisco Investments, American Express, Bajaj Finance and MediaTek.

MobiKwik competes with the likes of Paytm. It was valued at around $279 million in January.

Last month, it invested Rs 2 crore ($294,000) in Pune-based data science company Pivotchain Solutions Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

In February this year, MobiKwik had launched a digital enterprise solutions suite to simplify corporate processes such as employee rewards and reimbursements.