Pankaj Shamkunvar

Pankaj Shamkunwar is a banking and payments veteran with roughly 25 years of experience across banking, e-commerce, digital payments, fintech and retail. He is associated with Cipher-Plexus Capital Advisors — a Mumbai-headquartered mid-market investment bank formed in 2014 through the merger of Cipher Capital Advisors and Plexus Capital Ventures — where he has held the title of Business Director. Cipher-Plexus focuses on advisory work in private equity, mergers & acquisitions and special-situations funding, with a track record cited at 100+ transactions and a team of ~20–30 professionals operating out of Mumbai with associates in Bengaluru, Delhi and Chennai.

Much of Shamkunwar's operating career was built in the payments and cards business of India's large private banks. He is credited with being instrumental in setting up and building out the e-commerce and payment-gateway business of HDFC Bank, and his career history spans HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Citi. His domain expertise centers on the e-commerce and mobile-commerce payments space, merchant acquiring, and the plumbing of digital payment gateways in India.

More recently his public professional profile positions him in London as a payments fraud and risk specialist — described across "Cards & Merchant Acquiring, Authorised Push Payment (APP) Fraud, Regulatory Compliance & Risk Mitigation, Fintech, Legal and Financial Crime." He has also pursued legal/compliance education at The University of Law in the UK, complementing his payments and banking background with a financial-crime and regulatory focus.

*(Note: publicly available sources do not disclose a personal, self-stated investment thesis, a specific check-size range, or a defined target-company profile for Shamkunwar. Third-party aggregator entries that list large debt-fund check sizes for "Cipher-Plexus" appear to be conflated with an unrelated US lender and should not be relied upon.)*

• Works within Cipher-Plexus's model as a transaction advisor rather than a classic write-a-check angel: the firm connects companies to PE firms, family offices, HNIs and venture investors and represents them on sell-side/buy-side M&A and capital raises.
• Personal deal affinity sits in fintech, digital payments, e-commerce, merchant acquiring and banking/retail — sectors where he has direct operating experience from HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Citi.
• Firm-level focus spans companies from early stage through expansion and later-stage PE, across healthcare/life sciences, technology/media/telecom, manufacturing, consumer and infrastructure.
• Given his risk, compliance and financial-crime lens, he is likely to weigh regulatory readiness, fraud controls and payment-economics rigor heavily in any payments/fintech opportunity.