Our speakers

Skanda Jayaraman, CEO, Qapita Marketplace

With an experience of over 18 years across banking - Retail, Commercial & Investment Banking, Skanda Jayaraman is leading the QapMatch initiative by Qapita as the CEO - Qapita Marketplace. Skanda's experience in banking spans across PE, M&A and ECM transactions and under his leadership Spark Capital became a recognised pan-India franchise and a leader in multiple sectors. With 6+ years of experience as CEO of investment banking, Skanda has also played an advisory role for founders and investors leading to transactions worth over $1 Billion.

Smita Aggarwal, Director- Investments, Omidyar Network

Smita leads strategy and investments for Omidyar Network’s Financial Services initiative in India. She engages closely with innovative fintech companies and also has a board role in a few.

Smita has over 25 years of experience in banking and finance. Before joining Omidyar Network, Smita served as senior program director at CAFRAL, a global think tank promoted by the Reserve Bank of India. Prior to her time at CAFRAL, Smita was business head, Gramshakti at FullertonIndia Credit Company, a Temasek subsidiary, where she set up a business model to offer loans and other third party products to rural customers.

She began her career with ICICI Bank, where she held various leadership positions including head of rural and agricultural insurance business, head of strategy, head of e-channels, head of CRM, and head of international resources.

Smita volunteers with the Indian Cancer Society and spearheads one of the largest pan-India projects for providing financial grants for treatment of poor cancer patients. She was also instrumental in conceptualizing and launching the first debt mutual fund for supporting cancer cures.

A Chartered Accountant, Smita graduated from Sydenham College in Mumbai and attended executive programs at Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management.

Smita Deorah, Co-founder & Co-CEO, LEAD

Smita Negi, Head of Country Cluster IT for South Asia, Bayer

Smita Sircar, Innovations Director - edLABS and Ecosystem, Gray Matters Capital

Smita leads Gray Matters Capital’s education focused innovation and ecosystem building work out of India. She currently helms edLABS that provides very early stage funding to ‘visionary edu-preneurs’ to build disruptive solutions to education problems. She also builds collaboration with wider ecosystem players towards finding affordable and relevant solutions to quality education.

Prior to Gray Matters Capital, Smita has lived and worked in Africa, Asia, Europe and US. She headed the Research and Performance Management for Community Banking with Standard Bank (South Africa). She was in the start-up team of transformational consultancy Volans(UK) and held multiple roles with India’s largest private sector bank ICICI Bank.

Smitesh Valanju, CISO, Tata CLiQ

Smrithi Menon, VP and Solutions Head, India, Tata Communications

Smriti Tomar, Founder & CEO, Stack Finance

Smriti is CEO and Founder of Stack Finance, where she is building an extraordinary product that will revolutionize personal finance in India. Stack is India’s first smart app made exclusively for young earners to help them to stop wasting money and start making better financial decisions. Stack is a data-driven money management platform that automates savings, investments and financial planning while targeting lifestyle and customer-centric offerings keeping in mind the needs of young professionals.

Smriti is an avid public speaker and has given numerous key note speeches at some of the most prestigious institutions and organizations across India like Economic Times, Amity University, Indian Institute of Technology Allahabad, BIT Mesra etc., which are mostly aimed at creating financial awareness and knowledge on fintech and emerging technologies.

She has been recognized by YourStory as top 5 young women entrepreneurs and also selected under $2Mn pledge by Tinder as top 10 women led startups, and recently got profiled by Fintech Finance (UK’s leading publication) alongside Anne Boden founder of Starling Bank- link

At Stack Finance, Smriti is envisioning a personal finance experience that’s never been seen before. She is a B.tech graduate from National Institute of Technology Bhopal and has had experience in data analytics field while working for Citibank Banamex, one of the largest commercial banks in Latin America to build risk strategies. She is also a blockchain developer and expert certified by IBM and The Hong Kong University. She holds proclivity for project development and management at large. She has also authored a patent on a system for secure exchange of traded securities and method thereof. She has been an avid investor since her teenage. She believes in value investing, and is a follower of John Bogle principles. Prior to this venture, she has worked as a data analyst at EXL services, focused in overseas finance and banking industry, particularly Citibank, Latin America.

Before joining EXL, she had worked at a SaaS based B2B company, Appointy Software Inc. that provides a booking platform for all professionals spread across 110 countries. She worked as a business development associate, her projects involved analyzing and designing marketing campaign (inbound) to get insights for better lead qualification, creating landing pages and CRM system, designing models for user research and feedback.

She is devoted to and excel in three areas—each area strengthening the others: marketing and product management; creating a financial investment venture that better serves customers profitably; women’s business success.

She has also gained huge media recognition, not only in India but also in China, Japan, Hong Kong and
other parts of Asia.

Sneha Shanti kumar Shah, Senior Assistant Editor, VCCircle (Moderator)

Snehasish Dutta, , Persistent Systems