PayU CFO Gurpreet Singh steps down

Posted on October 28, 2016

Naspers – backed PayU Payments Pvt. Ltd has witnessed yet another top level exit with the resignation of its CFO and vice president, Gurpreet Singh. Gurpreet Singh has quit the digital payments firm to join HCL Technologies. Gurpreet Singh, who was a part of PayU’s finance leadership team and was responsible for formulating business strategy and vision, financial budgets and managing investors’ expectations. He didn’t give more details about his role at HCL. “It is still evolving”, he said. His last working day at PayU was October 14, 2016.

Recently, PayU and Citrus Pay merged in a $130 million deal. As part of the deal, the merged firm also witnessed management restructuring under which PayU’s co – founder and CEO, Nitin Gupta quit the firm. Citrus Pay’s managing director; Amrish Rao took over as the CEO of the merged firm while its founder, Jitendra Gupta joined as managing director. “The shifting has nothing to do with the merger and consolidation and is more to do with my personal interest of switching from a finance leadership role to a business strategy role”, Gurpreet Singh said.

Earlier this week, Abhishek Tripathi, associate director and business head at PayU, announced his decision to quit the company to lead the SMB (small and medium-sized business) vertical of Airtel Payments Bank. In July, PayU’s digital marketing head Saranjeet Singh joined Airtel Payments Bank (formerly known as Airtel M-Commerce Services Ltd) doing a similar role. Airtel Payments Bank is one of the eleven firms which got the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)’s in-principle nod to offer payment banking services. The firm, which has its presence in more than eight hundred cities and towns across India, has been implementing its plan to expand its banking network and reach out to place in the country.

Gurpreet Singh has played an important role as CFO in PayU. His experience in planning business strategies and managing budgets and investors’ expectations will definitely come in handy at HCL. We can bet that there too, he will be given a key post like one of the ‘C class’ executives. His decision to switch over from a financial head to a business strategy head will add lots of value to his resume and will enable him to reach top posts in other firms later on in his career. PayU meanwhile needs to keep its employees, especially the top management happy, by carefully planning and restructuring the merged organization in such a way that people, who had occupied top posts in the organization, get a similar post in the merged organization, in order to prevent discontent among officers and total collapse of its organization structure. Read more on Startups