Meet the 2020 Academy

Meena Sivan

Co-Founder, Chief MSME development Officer, SathSung Services

Growing up as a shy small town girl, in a humble background with many unwritten patriarchal norms, broke many taboos to become a business leader in Digital Payments and Digital MSME lending with concept to commercial launches across 7 APAC countries with over 15 years of experience driving Financial Inclusion, dreaming of eliminating "Poverty Penalty" by democratizing financing.

After the completion of M.Tech in Laser Technology and Optical Communication Engineering, started her career as a Software Developer,

worked across India, Canada; Deep inside her, she always knew that her high is in exploiting technology for a common cause. Her people skills urge to be working on the ground, influenced her launching her first venture in Innovations management systems, that facilitated the flow of great ideas across functions crossing the barriers of hierarchical organization, that created many internal patents.

Her conviction in the potential of Digital Financial Services for the cause of Social-Financial independence for rural and urban lower income groups, drove her to building partnerships with the founders of bKash Bangladesh, and “MoneyonMobile” India, and other countries. There is no looking back - since 2010, she has been a thought leader and an executional leader in launching many concepts to commercial products with the sole goal of inclusive development and sharing economy across the spectrum with digital media as a channel of cost-effective delivery.

She continued her quest for knowledge, pursued her TRIUM MBA, a demanding joint program of 3 LSE, Stern-NYU and HEC-Paris, earnt her MBA in September 2019, and a valuable global perspective from the cohorts who are from 27 different nationalities. Currently she is preparing to launch her next venture and democratizing MSME loans by deploying voice as new UI for overcoming the barriers of digital illiteracy and DLT for creating an alternate data-based credit scores for the financially excluded segments.