Paytm Money names former Amazon exec as CTO

Paytm Money Ltd, the wealth management arm of digital payments company Paytm, has appointed Suresh Vasudevan as its chief technology officer (CTO).

Vasudevan will lead the overall engineering and technology functions and will be based out of Bengaluru, Paytm Money said in a statement.

“Suresh will also be working on building Data Science and AI capabilities for Paytm Money as we continue focusing on automating our platform and building robo-advisory based investment products to ease the investment advice and decision-making process for our users,” said Pravin Jadhav, whole-time director at Paytm Money.

Vasudevan was previously the head of engineering for Amazon’s Alexa Skills Certification platform. Vasudevan also briefly served as vice president-engineering at e-commerce firm Paytm Mall.

He has more than 20 years of experience in product development for various startups and enterprise product companies across the payments, e-commerce and fintech domains, Paytm Money said.

Paytm parent One97 Communications Ltd had last year appointed Pravin Jadhav to lead Paytm Money. Jadhav was previously the chief executive officer of social wishlist startup Wishberg.

Last October, Paytm Money nominated Cyrus Khambata, former executive director at Central Depository Services Ltd, to its board of directors.

A wholly-owned subsidiary of Paytm, Paytm Money builds investment and wealth management products for its users, all of which are delivered through its mobile application.

The company claims to have partnered with 35 asset management firms that cover 94% of the industry’s assets under management. Users can opt to invest through systematic investment plans or put in money through mutual fund schemes.

Paytm Money says it offers only direct plans of mutual funds that come with lower expense ratio owing to zero distribution fees or commissions which in turn give investors a better return on investments.