Ajay Desai — CEO

The word 'Intrapreneur' best describes my professional career of 27+ years across various sectors. I have been conceiving, creating and nurturing unique initiatives within big organizations. I was able to achieve great successes with most of these initiatives by leveraging my biggest asset, 'Relationship Capital'. The over-arching approach that I have adopted in my banking career is "Frugal Innovations for Financial Inclusion (FI4FI)", wherein I leveraged pre-existing outreach of external partners to provide financial services to underbanked sections through a Win-Win-Win model. Some of the initiatives where I have contributed significantly are Saakav - (which means a traditional bridge) aims to create a unique Marketplace of unsecured micro-loans for the ‘Missing Middle’ market. While the other two segments, ‘Have & Have Not’ have witnessed significant improvement in access to credit, particularly after the advent of MFIs, the Missing Middle segment continues to depend upon informal credit sources. Saakav’s main frugal innovation is the Collaborative Intelligence driven credit appraisal platform, Saakav Interactive Assessment (SIA). Besides, Saakav is also offering hyperlocal presence for complete lifecycle management of lending operation. Missing Middle is the Next Billon opportunity for the formal financial sector. YES LEAP - Innovative MUDRA Loans program, which leverages technology and Business Correspondent (BC) Model to overcome 'Last Miles Challenges'. YES MONEY - Innovative Domestic Remittance Platform, which again leverages technology and Business Correspondent (BC) Model to provide remittance and other services to urban migrants in their vicinity and at a convenient time. YES SAMPANN - Started in 2006, in Technical Collaboration with Accion International, this was India's first bank-led initiative for providing unsecured loans to Microenterprises and Women Entrepreneurs. B2B2C Model - During the initial years of YES BANK, when branch footprint was limited, we had extensively used Business to Business to Customer Model to reach out to farmers through institutional participants of agricultural value chains. This greatly improved our outreach as well as credit quality. Microfinance Development Team - This unique initiative of ICICI Bank started in 2005 to help NGOs working in microfinance to transform into full-scale Microfinance Institutions. We had supported 168 such NGOs across India and many of the current big MFIs have benefited from this program in their formative years.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Fintech expert with a strong focus on financial inclusion and rural development.

Location: Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Experience: 22 yrs 10 mos