I work to shape digital rails and their enabling policies to drive economic shifts.

01
About

A digital specialist and practitioner economist

I trained in economics and public policy, but spend most of my time developing digital architectures — sitting with ministries, regulators, central banks, and private sector engineering teams to design digital ecosystems and drive adoption at national scale.

India's Account Aggregator for open finance and Udyam for small business identity are two systems I helped drive into use via enabling regulation and digital upgrades. Through the Centre for DPI, I help other countries craft their versions of data sharing rails.

What pulls me to this is poverty. I care about the people digital infrastructure is meant to serve, and I come at the work with high empathy for them. I'm also a bit of a technocrat — I like the architecture, the incentives and the numbers, because that's what makes the empathy count for something. The frontiers I'm focused on now are 1) Scaling models to quickly deploy DPI for foundational identities, inclusive payments, and high provenance data sharing (including VCs) to emerging economies around the world; and 2) shaping AI: how it sits inside public infrastructure, and what technology policy and regulation it needs.

I'm also curious about how nations using AI are building their own DPI rails — via MCP, sovereign AI access gateways, and beyond — to enable societies to leverage its capabilities to advance human development.

Work I'm proudest of helping shape:

65+
Countries advised on DPI
5B+
Consented data-sharing transactions via AA
₹1.67L cr
Loans facilitated via AA
$845M+
World Bank digital ID projects influenced
₹30L cr+
MSME loan book reachable via Udyam KYC
02
Career

Where I've worked

2023 — now

Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure

Cofounder & CEO · Bangalore — funded by the Gates Foundation & Co-Develop
2022 — 2023

Ministry of Finance, Government of India

Advisor, DPI & Account Aggregator · technical expert, G20 Finance Track
2020 — 2022

iSPIRT Foundation

Fellow & Policy Lead, Account Aggregator — founding team of Sahamati
2018 — 2019

EkStep Foundation

Digital Jobs & Skilling Lead — registries & open APIs with the Ministry of Skill Development
2016 — 2018

The World Bank Group

Operations Analyst, ID4D (founding member) · Washington D.C., Abidjan & Abuja
2014 — 2016

The Boston Consulting Group

Associate · London — Social Impact Fellow
See all publications →
See Boards & Advisory roles →
03
Selected work

Building the rails of a digital economy

Centre for DPI — Taking DPI Global, from zero to ten

  • Cofounded and built CDPI from scratch — a global nonprofit DPI advisory housed in IIIT-Bangalore
  • Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Co-Develop
  • A 15-person team across 7 nations advising 65+ countries on identity, payments and data sharing
  • Helped Trinidad & Tobago, Brazil and Colombia go live on digital wallet and credential infrastructure

Account Aggregator — India's open finance ecosystem

  • On the founding team alongside Nandan Nilekani, Pramod Varma and Sanjay Jain — with Siddharth Shetty and BG Mahesh — when iSPIRT was incubating what became the Sahamati Foundation
  • Policy lead for the national rollout at the Ministry of Finance
  • Drove adoption from 200 million to 1.1 billion accounts live for consented data sharing — SEBI circular, RBI Master Direction, MoF press release
  • Brought GSTN into the framework — the legal basis for 10 million GST-registered businesses to share invoices with lenders
  • Principal author of NITI Aayog's DEPA strategy paper

Udyam — Digital KYC for small businesses

  • Persuaded the Ministry of MSME to issue digitally signed, machine-readable Udyam certificates through DigiLocker
  • Drove the RBI notification that made Udyam valid digital KYC
  • India's MSME credit market runs to roughly ₹30–35 lakh crore (about $360–420 billion)
  • 7.8 crore+ enterprises now Udyam-registered — a growing KYC backbone for formal lending to firms banks once found too costly to onboard

World Bank ID4D — digital identity at scale

  • Founding team member of the Identification for Development (ID4D) initiative, selected from ~14,000 applicants
  • Supported preparation of a ~$450M ID project in Nigeria
  • Supported preparation of the Bank's first regional digital ID operation across 10 West African countries (WURI) — $130M committed for Phase I
  • Authored the Aadhaar case study
  • Prepared the launch of the High Level Advisory Council chaired by the World Bank CEO
04
Writing & publications

Selected publications

Lead or Contributing Author

Digital infrastructure for student mental health: a Viksit Bharat priority Co-author with V. Anantha Nageswaran (Chief Economic Advisor, India) · Mint Opinion, 2026
Credit where it's due: India's Account Aggregator ecosystem is ready to multiply our digital dividends Co-author with V. Anantha Nageswaran (Chief Economic Advisor, India) · Mint Opinion, 31 Aug 2025
Creating Value for Taxpayers Lead author with Tanushka Vaid & Pramod Varma · IMF Finance & Development, September 2024
Successful Design of Open Finance: Lessons from India and Brazil Lead author Centre for DPI, 2023
The DPI Wikipedia Co-author Centre for DPI, 2024 · 120+ articles on technical and implementation aspects of various DPI building blocks
User-Centric Credentialing & Personal Data Sharing Co-author Centre for DPI, 2024
Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) Principal author with Siddharth Shetty · NITI Aayog, August 2020
A Great Leap Forward to Transform Fintech: Data Empowerment Principal author iSPIRT, December 2019
Cost Drivers of Identification Systems Co-author with Koshy Thampy et al. · World Bank ID4D, December 2018
Strengthening Credit Flows to the MSME Sector (46th Report) Contributing author Recommendations chapter · Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance, July 2022

Peer review

Digital Public Infrastructure and Development: A World Bank Group Approach Reviewer World Bank, 2025
Digital Wallets Reviewer World Bank, 2024
Unlocking the Potential of DPI in Latin America & the Caribbean: A Region-specific Perspective Reviewer World Bank, 2024
Comparing India's UPI and Brazil's Pix Reviewer Carnegie, 2022
G20 Policy Recommendations for Advancing Financial Inclusion and Productivity Gains through Digital Public Infrastructure Reviewer World Bank · G20, 2023
Report of India's G20 Task Force on Digital Public Infrastructure Reviewer Government of India, 2023
The DPI Approach: A Playbook Reviewer UNDP, 2023
05
Boards & advisory

Boards & Advisory roles

Advisory Board

Centre for Public Intelligence

Advisory board of a new institution founded by Oxford researchers, working on data and AI for the public interest.

Advisory Board

Code for GovTech (C4GT)

Advisory board of the govtech and digital public goods mentorship programme at IIIT-Hyderabad.

Advisor

Sahamati Foundation

Advisor to Sahamati, India's industry body for consented financial data sharing under the Account Aggregator framework.

Former Advisor

Ministry of Finance, India

Advised on Account Aggregator adoption and DPI strategy across India's public sector banks. As technical expert on India's G20 Presidency (Finance Track), supported the Department of Economic Affairs on DPI for financial inclusion and a multi-year action plan.

06
Speaking engagements

Keynotes & Panels

I've given keynotes and joined panels at the India AI Summit, the Carnegie Global Technology Summit (Carnegie India), the World Bank Spring Meetings, and G20 India Presidency events. I also orchestrated the Account Aggregator National Launch with a keynote by the RBI Deputy Governor. Other talks and lectures span Harvard Kennedy School, Yale, Cambridge CCAF, LSE, the OECD, the Bangalore Tech Summit, the iTech Law Summit, France's Digital Ambassador's office and the DPGA 50-in-5 campaign.

07
Contact

Open to conversations and initiatives on DPI, AI governance, financial inclusion and technology policy.

kamya@cdpi.dev LinkedIn Twitter / X
© 2026 Kamya Chandra Bangalore · India