At the India-based digital payments and m-commerce company, Vikas Agrawal helped grow the platform to 250 million registered users

Today, Grab has appointed Vikas Agrawal as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for its mobile payments platform GrabPay.

The announcement comes just shy of a month after the Southeast Asian ride-hailing giant expanded GrabPay’s capabilities to allow merchants to transact with customers, based on a QR-code system.

Based in Bangalore, Agrawal has two decades of experience in India’s fintech space. He was the Senior Vice President of Engineering of leading India-based digital payments and m-commerce company Paytm.

During his time, Agrawal oversaw a 200 engineer strong team and helped grow the platform to 250 million registered users.

Prior to working at Paytm, he was founding member and CTO at Fashionara, an e-commerce startup, Vice President of Engineering at Tavant, a SaaS startup as well as a technical architect at CyberCash, an e-payments startup.

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“Vikas has steered some of the world’s largest e-payments platforms through rapid growth, including during the critical time of 2016’s demonetization of higher value banknotes in India,” said Theo Vassilakis, Group CTO, Grab, in an official press statement.

“We believe Southeast Asia has the same potential for e-payments in the next 12 months. Under Vikas’ leadership, we have an enviable GrabPay engineering organisation that can reliably and securely build GrabPay into SEA’s universal payments platform,” he added.

Agarwal’s appointment is the latest in Grab’s string of business decisions to bolster its full-suite e-payments plan this year.

Previously, it appointed Jason Thompson, a former Managing Director for EMEA and Asia at Euronet, to lead GrabPay as Managing Director, GrabPay Southeast Asia. It then acquired Indonesian e-commerce portal Kudo, shortly after.

The acquisition play by Grab was designed to encourage consumers to make e-commerce purchases via GrabPay.

Grab also unveiled the opening of three new R&D centres in Bangalore, India; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Jakarta, Indonesia to ramp up product development.

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Image Credit: Grab

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