Vivek Kumar

Vivek Kumar has over 30 years of experience in the payments and broader financial services business, with specialist knowledge in credit, debit, prepaid and commercial cards, merchant acquiring/digital payments, unsecured personal and instalment loans.

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Vivek started his career with Citibank as part of the founding team that launched credit cards in India.  Following 6 exciting years across sales and marketing roles, Vivek moved to Bank of America to lead the product management team for deposit products. During the period, Vivek led the launch of a number of significant deposit initiatives including the Corporate Employee Deposit and the Resident Foreign National Account Programs.  Vivek was part of the core team that worked in conjunction with McKinsey & Co to develop the India retail strategic plan.

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Vivek joined MasterCard in 1999 spending 12 years leading one of their largest and most successful Global Key Account teams (HSBC) across Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa based in Hong Kong. During the period, he led a number of investment initiatives to secure growth and share for MasterCard launching several key co-brand programs in China including Best Buy and Sunning, and Woolworths in Australia.

 

In 2010  Vivek re-joined Citibank as the Head of Unsecured Lending for India with business management responsibility across Instalment Loans, Personal Loans, Ready Credit (loans against checking accounts) and Bancassurance. During the term, Vivek implemented a coherent India consumer lending strategy aimed at achieving rapid scale for the consumer loans portfolio and cards balance sheet “re-growth”.

 

Vivek was appointed Managing Director, Head of Asia Pacific at JPMorgan Chase to lead the expansion of Chase Merchant Services across priority markets in 2013. In addition to supporting development of the regional growth strategy and product road-map, Vivek led the in-region business development and CRM for institutional clients of Chase domiciled in APAC.

 

As Partner at Pinnacle, Vivek specialises in helping issuers and acquirers improve the performance of their debit, credit, prepaid and private label portfolios having practical subject matter expertise in the following areas:

 

• Customer value proposition development

• Product profitability

• Customer segmentation

• Product sales and distribution

• Portfolio management

• Portfolio conversions

• Product and customer pricing

• Portfolio profitability & P&L optimisation

• Co-brand & partnership program negotiation

• Scheme and issuer RFPs

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