India Post Payments Bank (IPPB) has appointed Suresh Sethi as its Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Sethi was till recently the CEO of Vodafone M-Pesa Ltd., Vodafone’s mobile payment service. Banks Board Bureau selected Sethi from among other senior executives in the banking and fintech industry. He will be taking over from A.P. Singh, who had been appointed as the interim MD and CEO of IPPB in January this year.
Sethi had joined Vodafone back in November 2012, and was responsible for “defining and developing the M-Pesa business strategy for India.” Prior to joining Vodafone, Sethi served as the Group President for transaction banking and financial institutions at Yes Bank Ltd. for close to seven years, between September 2004 and July 2011. Sethi had begun his career at Citibank in 1990 and stayed with them for 14 years, serving in various roles including Business Head of East Africa (Kenya), Regional Business Manager – CitiDirect (UK & Argentina), Business Head of Caribbean and Central America (Florida), and Regional Business Manager of Latin America (Florida).
As of January 2017, IPPB was operational only with 8 access points in total, in Raipur (Chhatisgarh) and Ranchi (Jharkhand). At the time, it planned to set up access points in post offices in up to 650 districts with linkages to all post offices (around 1.55 lakh of them) across India, by September 2017, “subject to feasibility and fulfillment of regulatory requirements.” Now it has said that “IPPB plans to leverage the unparalleled reach of the India Post network to achieve a Pan India roll out of 650 branches by early next year (2018).”
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