EXANOR Meets NPCI Director Nitin Mishra at AI Summit 2026

Quick summary: At the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, the EXANOR team had the opportunity to meet Nitin Mishra, Director and Executive Director – Operate at NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India), the organization behind UPI, RuPay, IMPS, and BHIM. Here's how the meeting came together and what it means for EXANOR's journey.

It Started With a Walk Across the Expo Floor

Bharat Mandapam on the third day of the summit was pure controlled chaos — the good kind. Thousands of badges, a hundred different conversations happening in a hundred different corners of the hall, and somewhere in the middle of it, a small EXANOR booth trying to explain, in thirty seconds or less, what it means to bring AI into GST filing for a kirana store owner in Assam.

Our team had just wrapped a demo for a delegation from a state IT department when someone from the passing crowd paused a little longer than most people do. He asked a simple but sharp question: "So where does the AI actually save time — filing, reconciliation, or both?"

It wasn't until a few minutes into the conversation, once badges were properly read and hands were shaken, that we realized who we were talking to — Nitin Mishra, Director at NPCI. The person who had helped build GSTN's taxation backbone, led technology at ONDC, and was now steering some of NPCI's most important subsidiaries, including the ones expanding UPI globally.

There's a particular kind of nervous energy that hits a small team when a conversation like that happens unplanned. You don't get a rehearsed pitch — you get the real one. And in some ways, that made it better.

A Conversation That Went Deeper Than Expected

What started as a two-minute stop turned into a much longer conversation than anyone on our team had anticipated. His questions weren't the polite, surface-level kind you brace for at a crowded expo — they were the kind that come from someone who has actually built the infrastructure he's asking about.

He wanted to know how EXANOR handles reconciliation for retailers juggling both UPI and cash transactions. He asked about the friction points small business owners face when GST filing deadlines collide with festival-season sales rushes — a problem, it turned out, he understood intimately from his GSTN days. At one point, the conversation turned reflective, with him noting that the founders who really last are the ones who keep building for the person standing behind the counter, not just for scale on a slide deck.

It was a small comment, almost offhand, but it landed. It captured, in a single line, exactly the philosophy EXANOR was built on.

Who Is Nitin Mishra?

For context, Nitin Mishra is a well-known name in India's digital public infrastructure story. He currently serves as Director and Executive Director – Operate at NPCI, where he has played a central role in expanding NPCI's footprint through subsidiaries like NPCI International Payments Ltd (NIPL) for the globalization of UPI and RuPay, NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd (NBBL), and NPCI BHIM Services Ltd (NBSL).

Before joining NPCI, he served as CTO at ONDC, where he led technology strategy for India's first open commerce network, and prior to that, as CTO at GSTN, where he played a key role in building and operating one of the world's largest taxation networks during the rollout of GST in India. With 30+ years of experience across companies like EY, Walmart Labs India, Oracle, Yahoo, and Goldman Sachs, he's someone whose career has repeatedly intersected with the exact kind of large-scale digital infrastructure that companies like EXANOR build on top of — UPI, taxation networks, and open digital commerce.

What the Conversation Meant for EXANOR

As a platform built to simplify accounting, GST compliance, and inventory management for Indian retailers and SMEs, EXANOR sits at an interesting intersection — much of what we automate (GST filing, payment reconciliation, transaction records) is deeply tied to the digital public infrastructure that NPCI and its ecosystem partners have built over the past decade.

Meeting someone with Nitin Mishra's background — spanning GSTN, ONDC, and now NPCI — gave our team a rare, ground-level perspective on:

• How India's payments and taxation infrastructure is evolving toward deeper interoperability

• The role AI can play in making digital public infrastructure more accessible to small businesses

• What it takes to build and scale infrastructure that serves hundreds of millions of users reliably

• The bigger picture of how platforms like EXANOR can align with national digital infrastructure as we grow

For a company like ours, still early in its journey, this kind of exposure — sitting across from someone who helped shape GST, ONDC, and now UPI's global expansion — is exactly the kind of moment the summit was designed to create.

Why Moments Like This Matter for Startups

The India AI Impact Summit 2026 was built around a simple idea: bring policymakers, builders, and institutions into the same room so that conversations turn into outcomes. For a homegrown platform like EXANOR, built by CybroXide Technologies, opportunities to connect directly with leaders from institutions like NPCI are rare — and valuable.

These aren't just photo-op moments. They're a reminder that the infrastructure Indian SMEs rely on every day — UPI payments, GST filings, digital billing — is being actively shaped by people who are open to hearing from the startups building on top of it.

The Walk Back to the Booth

By the time the conversation wrapped, the crowd around us had thinned out and the next scheduled session was already pulling people toward the main hall. Someone from the team joked that we should've had a proper pitch deck ready, just in case. But looking back, the unscripted version — a real question, a real answer, and a real exchange of ideas — probably said more about EXANOR than any deck could have.

We walked back to the booth a little quieter than usual, replaying the conversation. It wasn't a funding announcement or a formal partnership — just a conversation. But at a summit built entirely around turning AI discussions into real-world impact, that felt like exactly the kind of moment worth remembering.

What's Next

Meeting Nitin Mishra at the summit is one more data point reinforcing why EXANOR exists — to help Indian retailers and SMEs make the most of the digital infrastructure India has built. As we continue building out EXANOR's AI-powered accounting, GST, and inventory tools, conversations like this one help sharpen our understanding of where the ecosystem is headed next.

Want to see how EXANOR fits into this bigger picture of AI-powered digital infrastructure for Indian businesses? Explore EXANOR here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who is Nitin Mishra at NPCI? A: Nitin Mishra is Director and Executive Director – Operate at NPCI, where he has helped build NPCI's subsidiaries including NIPL (UPI/RuPay globalization), NBBL (bill payments), and NBSL (BHIM UPI). He previously served as CTO at ONDC and CTO at GSTN.

Q: Where did EXANOR meet Nitin Mishra? A: At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, held at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, from February 16–20, 2026.

Q: What is NPCI? A: NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) is the umbrella organization that operates India's retail payment and settlement systems, including UPI, RuPay, IMPS, and BHIM.

Q: How does this connect to what EXANOR does? A: EXANOR builds AI-powered accounting, GST, and inventory tools for Indian SMEs — much of which relies on the same digital payments and taxation infrastructure that NPCI and related bodies like GSTN have built.