Bharat Panchal
Chief Industry Relations & Regulatory Officer – India, Discover Financial Services
"Bharat Panchal is India’s one of the finest industry leader who has been recognised
as a global thought Leader & Evangelist for Enterprise Risk, Cyber Security and
Data Sovereignty. Bharat is well-known as an architect of digital risk management
& cyber security of India’s entire retail payment ecosystem as he has built a worldclass digital risk management and cyber security environment for all products like
RuPay, IMPS, FasTag and the most prestigious UPI at NPCI. He possesses proven
skills in delivering cutting-edge risk & cyber security framework/solutions in sync
with business strategy with his far-sighted vision coupled with exceptional
innovation abilities to modernize risk oversight, minimize technology risks,
delivered payment risk solutions, and bolstering a competitive edge. Bharat Panchal is presently working as a Chief Industry Relations & Regulatory Officer - India for
Discover Financial Services where he is responsible to oversee and monitor compliance with applicable
laws and regulations of India and working closely and creatively with cross functional teams, including
Legal and Policy, in reviewing and addressing governmental regulations, Industry bodies guidelines,
agency guidelines, and policies.
Before moving to Discover in Oct, 21, He was working as a Chief Risk Officer for APAC, Middle East and
Africa with FIS Global a Fortune 300 and world’s no. 1 fintech supporting the banking and payment
services across the world. At FIS, he was responsible to ensure risk management & security compliance
for their customers across regions. In his most prominent professional journey, Bharat was working as Chief of Risk Management for more
than 8.5 years as a one of the strong pillars since inception of National Payments Corporation Of India
(NPCI), an umbrella organization for entire retail payments system in India. Bharat was responsible for
creating risk culture at NPCI and its ecosystem by way of designing, implementing and monitoring risk
controls. He managed key functions like Enterprise Risk Management, Cyber Security Compliance,
Operational Risk Management, Fraud Management and AML for NPCI and its ecosystem since inception
of NPCI. He led data and cyber security design and implementation of every product rolled by NPCI i.e.
RuPay, IMPS, BBPS, NACH, CTS, FasTag and most prestigious, UPI. Bharat worked very closely on
preliminary assessment of data localisation in 2017 and later worked with RBI in 2018 to implement
data localisation across the banking industry. He was instrumental to ensure that all foreign players
connected with NPCI complies to data localisation.
Bharat holds an MBA degree in Information Systems and has around 28 + years of rich experience of
risk management, mainly in the banking and telecommunication industry. Prior to NPCI, Bharat has
worked with Kotak Mahindra Bank, Citibank, Reliance Communications and Tata Telecom. He is one of the most sought speaker on Risk management, Data Sovereignty and cyber security subjects
worldwide. He has been part of 400+ conferences in India and 50+ international conferences across the
world as keynote speaker or panellist.
Twice, Bharat has been honoured with prestigious “Security Leader of the Year” Award in 2014 and
2017 by Data Security Council of India (DSCI) for his significant contribution in cyber security in banking
sector. Computer Society of India also has awarded him “Best CRO of the year” in 2016 apart from
several prestigious awards and recognitions from the industry.
He has been part of many committees of Govt. of India, RBI and IIT Kanpur on cyber security. He has
written many articles and papers on cyber security and risk management. He is also a co-author of
“Data Sovereignty – The pursuit of supremacy”, one of the most popular book on data of which,
25000 copies has been sold so far. "
