I’m Vinod Sharma — a financial-technology leader who transforms traditional financial platforms into AI-at-the-core systems. Over 25 years, including 17 in fintech and four tenures as Chief Technology Officer, I’ve taken mobile money, digital banking and payments platforms from fragile launches to industry-defining scale across Africa and Asia. I’m based in Nairobi, and I work at the intersection of code, capital, and cognition.
With four tenures and over a decade as a fintech CTO, I’m also an active student of theoretical physics and a passionate landscape and architectural photographer.
Across 25 years — 17 of them in fintech — I’ve watched the industry transform from the inside, and helped drive that change. Blockchain brought trust and transparency; AI and machine learning brought intelligence that learns; IoT brought connectivity and inclusion; cloud brought the scale to reach millions. But the real shift isn’t any single technology — it’s the moment financial systems stop merely processing transactions and start reasoning about them. That’s the frontier I build for.
Intelligence is now the cornerstone of innovation in finance — and after years navigating both legacy and modern stacks, I bring deep, hands-on command across the full picture: fintech business, product, and software and platform engineering.
My domain is financial technology. I use first-principles and systems thinking to extract value from any technology stack — legacy (monolithic or microservices), modern (cloud-native), intelligent (AI, blockchain, IoT), or emerging (CBDC, agentic AI). My focus is constant: scalable, secure financial systems that bridge deep technical depth with real business outcomes.
Current CTO of
- M-Pesa Africa — the Safaricom–Vodacom fintech joint venture, and the largest mobile-money platform on the African continent.
Former CTO of
- Ascend Bit Company – Blockchain based FinTech company,
- Ascend Money (True Money) – Thailand’s first Fintech unicorn and the largest financial technology services company owned by CP Group
- EcoCash Zimbabwe, Southern Africa’s biggest Fintech.
I have extensive experience in various
My work spans the full fintech stack — payments, mobile money, and the financial services built on top — increasingly with AI at the core of each layer:
- Payments — switching, wallets, payment intelligence, and merchant-driven (pull) payments, with smart, context-aware payment flows.
- Revenue-generating services — remittances, lending, savings, insurance, and wealth management, with AI-driven credit scoring, risk pricing, and personalisation.
- Revenue-boosting services — advanced analytics and machine learning, blockchain-based loyalty, gamification, e-commerce, and cross-border remittances.
- Revenue-protecting services — eKYC, AML, fraud, risk, and reconciliation, built on AI-assisted profiling, transaction monitoring, and alert management — with deterministic, regulator-defensible decisioning, and financial-domain RAG for explainability.
What sets me apart is simple: I don’t just set AI strategy — I build it. I’ve personally architected and shipped production-grade AI systems end to end — AML and sanctions-screening engines, agentic-RAG document intelligence, multi-agent platforms, quantitative analytics — governed, tested, and built to survive a regulator’s scrutiny. And I build them to be practical: self-hosted, efficient, and affordable to run in regulated environments, not dependent on runaway cloud or token bills. I stay close enough to the code to tell discipline from hype — increasingly rare at this level.
I’ve been in this industry since 2008, back when “fintech” was simply called mobile money — early enough to have helped shape it, not just watch it grow. Across those years I’ve worked globally in mobile money and mobile financial services, always with the same aim: solving real problems for real consumers and businesses. I’ve built and led startups and new business units at local and international scale, combining hands-on engineering with business strategy — and a constant insistence on security, privacy, and disciplined, agile delivery.
At the senior-leadership level, my work spans solution design and architecture, planning, technical operations, and software development, where I pair computer science and AI with practical product thinking to keep standards high and executive decisions well-informed. My experience reaches across telecom, IT, fintech, and value-added services — always centred on the customer.
What I value most isn’t capital — it’s conviction.
Mentoring is some of the most meaningful work I do. I’ve sat where early founders sit — caught between vision and payroll, between “what if?” and “what’s next?” — and I know how much a sharp, honest second voice matters at that stage. I help them refine their thinking and their pitch until it’s strong enough to cut through skepticism, and turn “someday” into Monday.
What I’m good at is seeing the real, unpolished spark in a person and helping it catch — pushing on a business plan where it needs pushing, backing an idea where it deserves backing. The world has enough critics. It needs more people willing to help build the thing everyone else called impossible.
Across my career I’ve mentored more than 2,000 engineers, architects, and founders, and led projects spanning software development, systems integration, and AI-driven analytics. My specialism runs deep through payments — traditional and mobile, payment intelligence, stored value — and across the wider fintech stack, applying machine learning, blockchain, and data science where they genuinely earn their place.
Projects Completed (Solution Designing & Architecture and Deployments)
- Selected projects — architected, built, and deployed:
- Conceived and built an AML and transaction-monitoring system (customer profiling, scoring, transaction tracking) from whiteboard to production — built once, deployed across six country operations.
- Designed and delivered Orbit, an international remittance platform — also built once and rolled out across six markets.
- Designed a Merchant Management System (MMS) deployed across the same six-market footprint.
- Co-created the blockchain and digital-assets foundation for CP Group, and stood up a common Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) infrastructure from the ground up.
- Delivered a MasterCard international debit card linked directly to the mobile-money wallet, and led the design and build of a banking-grade payment gateway.
- Architected core banking (Temenos T-24), payment switches, and data-centre infrastructure for banks and mobile network operators.
Subject Matter Expertise / Core Skills
- AI & intelligent systems — data science, machine learning, deep learning, and agentic AI applied to real fintech problems, from architecture through production.
- Financial-services platforms — product design and delivery across mobile and web: cross-border remittances, banking-grade switches, and payment gateways.
- Engineering leadership — solution design and architecture, complex HLD/LLD, capacity planning, and leading senior engineering and SME teams.
- Programme & delivery — CAPEX/OPEX planning, programme management, product development, and running engineering, DevOps, and L3 operations at scale.
- Cloud & infrastructure strategy — hybrid cloud, data-centre, and centralised-solution architecture for regulated financial environments.
I hold a Master’s in Computer Applications (IGNOU, 2001–2003) and Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Applications (1997–2001) and Commerce (Delhi University, 1993–1996). My professional certifications include PMP, PRINCE2, and ITIL v3, alongside earlier technical credentials (CCNA, CCNP, MCSE, MCP).
I am committed to lifelong learning and aim to use technology to solve real-world problems, creating a positive impact for society and generating value. A solid understanding of the business world is essential for technology experts to develop products that lead to mutually beneficial outcomes. The adoption of new technologies can significantly enhance efficiency and increase revenue, while customer satisfaction serves as a testament to quality.
My mom taught me, “The more humility, the more success. The more the pride, the more the fiasco”. Thus, I am trying to be humble, easy, and low.
