Airtel Payments Bank is set for a leadership transition at the top of its Board, with Bharti Enterprises founder Sunil Bharti Mittal stepping down as Non-Executive Chairman and exiting the Board on September 30, 2026, after a decade with the payments bank.
The payments bank has appointed Shabnam Sinha as its next Chairperson for a three-year term beginning October 1, 2026. Her appointment has been approved by the Board and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
Sinha is currently an Independent Director on the Airtel Payments Bank Board. She also heads the Board’s Special Committee for Monitoring Frauds and serves on its Risk Management and IT Committees. With more than three decades of experience across financial services, development finance, public policy, and institutional transformation, she brings extensive expertise to the role.
Her professional career includes significant experience with the World Bank, where she advised governments and institutions across Asia, Africa, and Europe on areas including governance, risk management, and operational effectiveness. Sinha is expected to work closely with the bank’s leadership and Board to build on its existing progress and support its next phase of growth.
Mittal became Airtel Payments Bank’s Non-Executive Chairman in April 2016, around the time the bank began building its operations. Under his leadership, the company expanded significantly and emerged as India’s largest payments bank by revenue, with operations spanning both consumer and enterprise segments.
The leadership transition comes as Airtel Payments Bank continues to operate at significant scale within India’s digital payments ecosystem. According to the company, the bank has more than 121 million monthly active users and nearly 30 million bank account customers. Its services are available through the Airtel Thanks app and a network of more than 500,000 banking points.
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The bank also stated that its physical network reaches three out of four villages in India, while it identifies itself as the country’s second-largest mobile banking and UPI AutoPay player.
Mittal has described his decade-long tenure as a privilege and expressed confidence in Sinha’s ability to lead the organisation into its next phase.
