The former Protean eGov CEO takes charge as Visa seeks to defend and expand its position in one of the world’s most contested digital payments markets
Visa has appointed Suresh Sethi as Group Country Manager for India and South Asia, effective 27 April 2026. Sethi succeeds Sandeep Ghosh, who departed after more than four years with the company to pursue an external opportunity. The transition arrives at a testing moment for Visa in India — a market that is simultaneously one of its fastest-growing globally and one where the competitive and regulatory environment is becoming considerably more complex.
Who Sethi Is
Sethi brings close to three decades of experience spanning corporate banking, retail financial services, mobile money, and large-scale government technology programmes. He began his career at Citigroup, where he spent 14 years working across India, Africa, South America, and the United States in transaction banking services — a grounding that gave him an unusually broad view of how payments infrastructure operates across very different regulatory and consumer environments.
Most recently, he served as Chief Executive of Protean eGov Technologies, the company formerly known as NSDL e-Governance Infrastructure, which operates critical government-facing digital infrastructure in India including the PAN card system and the National Pension System. That role placed him at the intersection of financial services, government technology, and large-scale citizen-facing platforms — precisely the experience set that matters in a market where Visa’s growth is increasingly tied to public infrastructure, regulatory relationships, and government-backed payment initiatives.
The Market Sethi Inherits
India’s digital payments landscape has been transformed over the past decade, largely through the Unified Payments Interface, which has driven transaction volumes that dwarf what traditional card networks once handled. Visa has had to adapt — its growth in India now depends less on card-present transactions and more on its ability to embed itself in the broader payments ecosystem through tokenisation, cross-border flows, B2B payment solutions, and partnerships with banks and fintechs building on top of its network.
That context makes Sethi’s background in government technology and mobile money particularly relevant. The next phase of Visa’s India growth will not be won primarily through consumer card issuance. It will be built through institutional relationships, regulatory navigation, and the ability to position Visa’s infrastructure as complementary to — rather than competing with — India’s domestic payment rails.
Competition has also intensified from multiple directions. Domestic fintech firms have matured significantly, the RBI continues to shape the payments policy environment with consequential interventions, and global rivals including Mastercard are competing for the same bank and enterprise partnerships. Sethi’s mandate will require him to hold existing ground while identifying where Visa can move into higher-margin, higher-volume segments.
What the Appointment Says About Visa’s Priorities
The choice of a former government technology CEO over a career payments executive is instructive. It suggests Visa is prioritising regulatory credibility and institutional access in India over pure commercial acceleration — a reasonable judgement given how much of the Indian payments story now runs through government infrastructure and central bank policy. Sethi’s experience at Protean gives him direct familiarity with the bureaucratic and technical architecture of India’s digital public infrastructure stack, which is increasingly the terrain on which large payments decisions are made.
Whether that profile translates into the kind of commercial momentum Visa needs in South Asia — where markets such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal present their own distinct opportunities — remains the open question. The regional brief extends well beyond India, and building across South Asia requires a different kind of operational playbook than managing a single, well-established market presence.
