Bio

I'm an Ashoka Fellow and co-founder of pinBox Solutions, Singapore. pinBox is a global social pensionTech and expert advisory firm committed exclusively to supporting digital micro-pension inclusion in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Over the last 25 years, I've worked with several governments, regulators, DFIs, DFS stakeholders and financial institutions to help design, build and deploy inclusive micro-pension products, platforms and programs that enable non-salaried workers to accumulate savings for their old age. Between 1998 and 2010, I led an expert team that helped the Indian Government design and rollout India's National Pension System (NPS) that today has roughly 40 million subscribers and over US$120b in aggregate AUM. Between 2017 and 2018, I led a 9-member team that helped the Government of Rwanda to design, build and deploy Ejo Heza, Africa's first, government-sponsored digital micro-pension program that today has over 2.5m subscribers (half of whom are women) and an AUM of ~RwF 50b In 2005, my colleagues and I developed the concept of “micro-pensions” and set up a unique social enterprise focused exclusively on assisting low-income financially excluded individuals in India to accumulate micro-savings for their old age. By 2015, our social enterprise was helping ~2.5 million self-employed women to save for their old age using well regulated pension products. Today, many of these women have accumulated between half and one million rupees each for their retirement. I've also led several World Bank, ADB, UNCDF and FSD/UKAID funded projects and studies on digital micro-pension inclusion. I've had the privilege of serving on several government and regulatory committees on pension, tax and financial sector reform. More recently, I was a member of the Technology Sub-committee of the Reserve Bank of India for household finance.