Rashmi Pillai

Rashmi Pillai is executive director of FSD Uganda. Ms. Pillai has 13 years of experience in digital financial services, social enterprise and impact investing. She has worked with regulators, private sector entities and development partners across multiple South Asian and East African countries. Ms. Pillai's digital finance advisory efforts have ranged from guiding policy makers on payment digitization, Fintechs on cash-in, cash-out agent placement, mobile network operators on merchant payments, to bankers on shared agency banking.

Ms. Pillai is also the co-founder of the Sankalp Forum, one of the largest social impact forums in the world that began in India in 2009 and today has expanded to multiple Asian and East African countries.

Ms. Pillai is a Fulbright Scholar and holds a post-graduate degree in public policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She also holds a Masters in Spectroscopic Physics and a Bachelors in Physics from India.

By Rashmi Pillai

Blog

Merchant Payments: What About the Customers?

Shifting retail payments away from cash to digital instruments will require strong buy-in from end customers, who tend to like cash. How might they be persuaded?
Blog

Merchant Acquiring: Why Winning Is the Wrong Approach

Competition is heating up among digital financial services providers looking to stake a dominant position in the $35 trillion global retail payments market. But this could be a market where cooperation will be as important as competition for success.
Blog

Want Your Customers to Save More? Use Behavioral Economics

A behavioral economics experiment in Tanzania increased customers' savings by up to 11 percent using SMS messages about the balances of better savers.
Blog

Will Digital Payments Unlock Financial Access for Small Business?

Bundling digital payments with services that address common challenges for merchants could expand access to finance for small businesses.
Blog

Agents for Everyone: Removing Agent Exclusivity in Kenya & Uganda

Mobile money and banking agents blend seamlessly into the daily economic lives of consumers in countries like Kenya and Uganda, offering convenience and expanding access points to financial services. But agent exclusivity clauses can limit customers' choices.