Mahadevan Balakrishnan is Chief Operating Officer of NPCI. He has over 20 years of banking technology management experience with leading banks such as ABN AMRO Bank, Barclays, Citibank and DCB and was involved in the implementation of some of the payments systems for these banks. He has special interest in payment and remittance areas in banking. Academically, Balakrishnan has a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from Madras university in India and a Masters in Bank Management (MBM) from Alagappa University in India, and is also pursuing a Doctoral Study in Financial Management with the Department of Management Studies, Madras University, Chennai, Tamilnadu, India as an external candidate. He has a few publications related to payment systems on national and international journals.

He is also on the editorial board of Journal of Payment Strategy &  Systems – an international journal exclusively focussing on the payment space and published out of London, UK