Senapathy Gopalakrishnan, popularly known as Kris Gopalakrishnan, was appointed as the first chairperson of the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH) on November 17, 2020. Prior to this, Gopalakrishnan was serving as the chief mentor of ‘StartUp Village’, an incubator that enables start-ups to bring their unique ideas and business concepts to reality. He is the co-founder and former vice-chairman of Infosys.
Kris serves on the Board of Governors of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, and Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore. He is the Chairman of the Board of Governors of IIIT, Bangalore, and is also on the Board of Trustees of the Chennai Mathematical Institute.
He is recognised as a global business and technology leader, and was voted as the top CEO (IT services category) in Institutional Investor’s inaugural ranking of Asia’s Top Executives. He won the 2nd Asian Corporate Director Recognition Awards by Corporate Governance Asia in 2011. He was also selected to an elite list of global business thinkers, Thinkers 50, in 2009. He served as president of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in 2013-14, and was one of the co-chairs of the World Economic Forum in Davos, in 2014.
He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2011.
RBIH has been set up with a view to promoting innovation across the financial sector by leveraging on technology and creating an environment that would facilitate and foster innovation. It will create an eco-system to focus on promoting access to financial services and products as well as promoting financial inclusion by collaborating with financial sector institutions, technology industry, and academic institutions. It would develop internal infrastructure to promote fintech (financial technology) research and facilitate engagement with innovators and start-ups as well as exchange of ideas.
RBIH would be managed by a governing council of 10 members, including a chairperson.