Southeast Asian SME growth financing platform Validus has announced two key additions to its senior leadership team.
Vishal Shah
Vishal Shah has joined as President, Emerging Markets, and is responsible for driving growth in emerging and new markets.
He is a financial services veteran who brings more than 20 years of leadership and business experience in SME, commercial and retail banking across Asia with Techcombank and Standard Chartered.
Prior to joining Validus, Vishal was Chief Business Banking Officer for four years at Techcombank in Vietnam, where he drove strong bottom-line results – growing profit five-fold and income by three times.
Vishal was part of Techcombank’s Executive Team and was a member of the Executive Committee and several other Management and Steering Committees for various bank-wide multi-year transformation programs.
Vineet Agarwal
The second senior appointment was Vineet Agarwal who has has joined Validus as President, Neobank, and is responsible for driving the firms digital financial services and neobanking plans across Southeast Asia.
Vineet is a digital product development and payments expert with more than 16 years of experience in driving digital and data strategies across markets in the Asia-Pacific region with DBS and American Express.
Prior to joining Validus, Vineet was Executive Director, Regional Analytics, Consumer Banking Group and Wealth Management at DBS, where he drove the use of Business Analytics, AI and Machine Learning to solve business challenges across Consumer and Private Banking, and deployed several AI solutions in the region to drive business growth.
At American Express, he drove growth in eCommerce spend via several virtual payment products, a cross-border e-commerce solution and a fully digital mobile loyalty solution.
Validus continues to expand its team and has added more than 25% new hires in the past six months, with the majority coming in support of new technology and neobank initiatives.
The company recently surpassed US$1 billion in SME loan disbursals across Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand.
