Vibhor Mundhada

At a time when payments are evolving from a transactional utility into an increasingly intelligent layer of financial infrastructure, Vibhor Mundhada is positioning NEOPAY at the centre of that transformation. As Chief Executive Officer of one of the Middle East’s leading payments companies and the UAE’s second-largest merchant acquirer, Mundhada oversees a business that today extends well beyond traditional merchant acquiring, encompassing payment processing, embedded lending and merchant analytics for enterprises, SMEs, financial institutions and government clients across the region.

His career spans more than 18 years across finance and payments, with senior product and acquiring roles at Mashreq Bank, TimesofMoney and Citibank India. Over that period, he has helped build and scale major payments and merchant acquiring businesses, giving him a perspective that combines the institutional discipline of banking with the speed, technological ambition and customer focus increasingly associated with fintech. That combination has become particularly relevant as payments companies expand their role beyond transaction processing and into areas such as data, financing and digital commerce.

Under Mundhada’s leadership, NEOPAY entered a significant new phase with the completion of a US$385 million majority-stake transaction involving a consortium of Arcapita and DgPays. The deal marked NEOPAY’s transition into an independent, standalone fintech company and provided the impetus to accelerate its growth strategy. Rather than treating independence simply as a change in ownership, the company has used it as a platform to broaden its product offering, strengthen its technology capabilities and pursue new opportunities across the region.

That expansion is visible across NEOPAY’s portfolio. The company has introduced PayPal integration for international shoppers, expanded AI-powered embedded lending for SMEs and extended UPI acceptance through NPCI International. Its partnership with Emaar Entertainment brought UPI acceptance to online bookings for At the Top, Burj Khalifa, making NEOPAY the first company in the GCC to offer UPI acceptance for e-commerce. These initiatives reflect a broader strategy of making payment acceptance more connected, more international and more useful to merchants.

Artificial intelligence has become another central pillar of Mundhada’s leadership. NEOPAY has shifted towards what it describes as AI-native operations, embedding the technology across several layers of the business rather than limiting it to isolated customer-facing tools. Its multi-agent security architecture has reduced manual security-analysis workload by up to 80 per cent, while AI-assisted onboarding and automated Know Your Business checks are designed to reduce friction for merchants. An AI-powered analytics platform also allows merchants to interrogate their own transaction data using natural language, helping turn payments information into more accessible commercial intelligence.

The SME sector is particularly important within this strategy. By combining transaction activity with embedded finance, NEOPAY is extending its role from facilitating payments to supporting merchants’ wider financial needs. Partnerships with banks like Mashreq, Wio and alternate lenders like CredibleX have helped broaden access to embedded working capital, while relationships with Alipay+, WeChat Pay and others strengthen an ecosystem designed to serve both local businesses and an increasingly international customer base. For SMEs, this means payments infrastructure can become a gateway not only to acceptance, but also to financing, analytics and growth.

Mundhada’s influence also extends beyond NEOPAY. He was re-elected for a third term as Chairman of the Acquiring and Payments Committee at the UAE Banks Federation, where he contributes to industry discussions around standardisation, interoperability and merchant protection. The committee’s work supports the Cashless Strategy of the UAE, placing Mundhada within the broader development of the UAE’s payments ecosystem as well as the growth of the company he leads.

His academic background mirrors the intersection of technology and business that has defined his career. Mundhada holds an MBA in Finance and Marketing from the Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development and a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Communication from Nagpur University.

For NEOPAY, the direction under Mundhada is increasingly clear: payments remain the foundation, but intelligence, financing, international connectivity and AI are becoming the layers built on top. As the boundaries between banking, payments and fintech continue to converge, his leadership reflects a broader transformation across the industry; from processing individual transactions to building the digital financial infrastructure that enables businesses to operate more efficiently, understand their performance and grow.