phonepe board: PhonePe beefs up board with former revenue secretary, two Walmart executives

Walmart-backed digital payments major, PhonePe, has inducted new members to its board of directors, in a bid to strengthen its governance as the company prepares itself for a public listing.
The company has roped in former revenue secretary Tarun Bajaj on its board and appointed him the chairman of its risk committee.

Along with Bajaj, the Bengaluru-based entity has also brought onboard Walmart executives – John D Rainey, executive vice president and chief financial officer and Donna Morris, executive vice president and chief people officer – as non-executive directors.

Also read | Paytm crisis: PhonePe makes hay, user base climbs 15-20%

“We would like to confirm that Tarun Bajaj will be an Independent Director on the PhonePe Board and Chairman of the Risk Committee. We would also like to confirm that John D Rainey and Donna Morris have joined the PhonePe board as non-executive directors,” the company said in a statement to ETtech.

With this, PhonePe has beefed up its board strength to eight members.

Other members on the board are – PhonePe founders, Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari; Flipkart cofounder, Binny Bansal; Walmart’s executive vice president for international strategy and development, Leigh Douglas Hopkins, and advisor Rohit Bhagat. Moneycontrol first reported about the development on Tuesday morning.

Bhagat is also an independent director at online marketplace Meesho and in the past has sat on boards of Axis Bank, Flipkart among others.

PhonePe’s move to strengthen its board also comes as it recently altered its top deck to make way for a group structure, and appointed chief executive officers (CEOs) of various business lines.

The new vertical CEOs included Hemant Gala for lending business, Vishal Gupta for insurance business, Vivek Lohcheb for ecommerce app Pincode, and Ujjwal Jain as CEO of Share.Market, PhonePe’s latest product offering in the wealth management space.

The past week has also caught PhonePe’s rival Paytm dousing multiple fires, as persistent gaps were found in compliance of its associate entity, Paytm Payments Bank.

With the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), getting stricter on regulations, Indian fintechs have been making new additions to their board to help them with risk and compliance matters.

Last year, digital payments provider, Razorpay, set up an independent advisory board and hired former RBI deputy governor, N Vishwanathan, along with other industry experts, to help it with aspects of governance, compliance and risk management practices.