Pawan Bakhshi

Pawan Bakhshi is a Senior Program Officer (Financial Services for the Poor) at the India Country Office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He focusses on how to efficiently and effectively deliver digital financial services to the poor which can be scaled to national levels while partnering with the Government, Regulators and Private sector players.

Prior to joining BMGF, he worked with MicroSave, Bharti Airtel and SingTel in the area of mobile commerce and digital financial services. He co-created India’s first mobile wallet service - Airtel Money and later incubated the Transformation Track for providing Airtel Money services for the social sector covering people from the bottom of the pyramid.

Pawan earned his Ph.D. from Faculty of Management Studies, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Agra and his undergrad from the Delhi University.

By Pawan Bakhshi

Blog

Four Ways to Boost the Impact of India’s Direct Benefit Transfers

The Indian government is digitizing payments to beneficiaries of government subsidies, seeking to build a digital payment connection with every Indian household. How can these payments be combined with other efforts to help pull people out of poverty?
Blog

What’s Undermining India’s Financial Inclusion Progress?

The success of India's financial inclusion efforts hinges on one factor above all: the quality of the last-mile banking agent networks that will disburse payments and enable customers to access their bank accounts.