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

The Impact of Shutting Down Mobile Money in Uganda

Citing a threat to national security, the Uganda Communications Commission ordered mobile network operators to disable Uganda's mobile money platforms ahead of February 2016 elections. How were customers, mobile money agents, and other businesses affected by this shutdown?
Blog

Lessons from Aggregator-Enabled Digital Payments in Uganda

To understand factors impacting aggregator profitability regarding digital bulk disbursements, we took a close look at a pilot in Uganda, where six USAID funded organizations tested digital payments to end recipients via payment aggregators.
Blog

The Business of Aggregators: A Changing Market

Aggregators work in the background to help businesses, governments and donors easily connect with a variety of payment services. But how do aggregators get off the ground, what is their size and reach, and how does the business model work?
Blog

Aggregators: The Secret Sauce to Digital Financial Expansion

Aggregators are key players in the digital financial services ecosystem, but primarily operate in the background. What exactly is their role and why are they important?