Akshay Chopra

Akshay is a serial tech investor, inventor and board member. Akshay serves as Head of Innovation & Design for Visa for 90+ countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA), and on the Board of the MENA FinTech Association. He has built over 8 major innovation labs & hubs for tech firms and governments across Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. He leads teams of product experts, designers, engineers, and digital commerce specialists based in Visa’s Innovation Centre in Dubai, and Visa’s Innovation Studios in Moscow, Nairobi and Saudi Arabia. His team co-creates new commerce use cases with products with banks, internet companies, FinTechs and merchants across the region. Since 2021, Akshay has also been overseeing Visa’s cryptocurrency products in CEMEA. Akshay holds 8 global patents in the FinTech and payments, and has served in various digital leadership capacities in Asia-Pacific and EMEA. He has played a key the role in the development of numerous commercially successful products in eCommerce and digital banking. A veteran digital and product development expert, Akshay and his teams have run over 200 co-creation sprints with diverse partners. Akshay is an active venture investor, with several deals and exits in fintech, payments, eCommerce, AI and beyond. Prior to his current role, Akshay was a founding member of Visa’s Asia-Pacific Innovation Centre in Singapore, where he served as Senior Director and led partner co-creations. Prior to Visa, Akshay co-founded and led the Deloitte Greenhouse in Southeast Asia, a award-winning joint initiative between the Singapore government and Deloitte, focused on analytics-driven innovation. Before Deloitte, Akshay served as Director, Emerging Markets at Gartner, and started his career at Standard & Poor’s. Akshay holds an MBA from the Indian School of Business and BA (Honors) in Economics from the University of Delhi.