India Lead, Financial Services for the Poor, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Dr. Pawan Bakhshi is the India Country Lead - Financial Services for the Poor at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation where he works to broaden the reach of low-cost digital financial services for the poor. He is not focused on establishing a particular product or distribution channel, but rather on finding innovative ways to expand access and encourage markets to determine which products and channels are most effective. He focusses on how to deliver digital financial services efficiently and effectively to the poor & women which can be quickly scaled to national levels while closely working with the Government, Regulators, Public and Private sector players. In the past, he has worked with two of the leading Asian telecom services providers, namely Bharti Airtel in India and SingTel in Singapore in Mobile payments. He is considered a pioneer in the Digital Financial service arena and co-creator of India’s first mobile wallet - Airtel Money. He has been a part of several RBI committees on Financial Inclusion and a global evangelist for bringing the unbanked and the underbanked into the formal economy.