Sanjay Thakur

Sanjay Thakur is a career banker with over 28 years of wide and deep exposure across verticals in banking and financial services, having built his career with leading Indian private sector banks — Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, and Kotak Mahindra Bank. At Kotak Mahindra Bank, he joined as one of the first employees, working directly with the founder and senior management through the bank's formative years, and went on to serve in several consequential roles that contributed significantly to the institution's growth into one of the most respected banks in the APAC region. His most defining contribution was building and scaling the bank's MSME division into one of the most profitable and best-performing SME portfolios in the Indian banking system — a mandate that spanned acquisition strategy, credit risk framework design, large-scale fintech integration, enterprise digital transformation, and MSME policy advocacy at national forums including RBI, SIDBI, and CII. Beyond institutional banking, Sanjay has cultivated a strong presence across the global startup and innovation ecosystem. He is actively engaged with numerous startups across fintech, mobility, and Web3 as an investor, advisor, and mentor — working closely with Indian founders building ventures from India and across the world. He advises leading startup accelerators including T-Hub Foundation (Hyderabad), Stanford SEED, and India Accelerator (Delhi), and brings to each engagement a practitioner's understanding of markets, product- market fit, and financial infrastructure that few advisors can match. At his core, Sanjay is deeply human-centred — a believer in the primitives that hold economies and societies together: trust, access, inclusion, and the quiet dignity of enterprise at every scale. He is an active volunteer with Ratna Nidhi Charitable Trust and GAME Foundation, among others — organisations supported by leading Indian and global foundations, working at the intersection of education, healthcare, and care for the elderly, and advancing inclusivity and social upliftment. Through his work on the Finance Action Task Force (FATF) at GAME Foundation, he contributed to policy frameworks for micro and small business finance and gender-inclusive entrepreneurship. Sanjay feels privileged to have earned a breadth of engagement spanning institutional finance, frontier technology, the global startup ecosystem, and purposeful social impact — and carries each with equal seriousness of purpose.