Mahendra Katoch

Mahendra Katoch is a London-based fintech entrepreneur and engineer with deep expertise in cross-border payments infrastructure. He grew up in India and pursued higher education in the UK, studying at The Scindia School before completing a degree at the University of Southampton. His career placed him at the heart of two of the companies most responsible for reshaping how money moves internationally: Wise and, prior to that, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, where he built foundational experience in financial systems and global capital flows.

At Wise, Mahendra worked as a senior engineer on the core payments infrastructure that processes billions of dollars in cross-border transactions annually. Working from the inside of a company explicitly built to challenge the legacy correspondent banking system, he developed a precise understanding of where even the most forward-thinking fintech platforms still relied on traditional fiat-to-fiat rails and the structural limitations those rails impose. Settlement delays, counterparty risk accumulating in transit, and limited transparency for the businesses sending and receiving funds were persistent pain points that Wise's architecture — for all its innovation — had not fully resolved.

That insight led Mahendra to co-found Riva Money in 2025, alongside Niklas Höjman, a former Revolut executive who had managed FX exposure on $150 billion in annual payment volume. Together they built a dual-rail payments infrastructure that routes each cross-border business payment dynamically through either blockchain-based stablecoin settlement or traditional banking rails, depending on which delivers the better outcome in speed, cost, and compliance for that specific transaction. Mahendra leads the technical architecture at Riva as CTO and Co-Founder, building the engineering foundation for a system designed to make business payments faster, cheaper, and more transparent without requiring clients to manage crypto exposure.

Riva raised £2.2 million in pre-seed funding in August 2025, led by Project A, with angel backing from executives at Revolut, Monzo, Ebury, and JP Morgan. Riva Money Europe AB has since been authorised as a Payment Institution by Sweden's Finansinspektionen, a key step in the company's regulatory expansion across Europe. Mahendra's trajectory — from financial engineering at global investment banks to building the next generation of cross-border payment rails — places him at the intersection of two of the most significant trends in global finance: the maturation of stablecoin regulation and the growing demand from businesses for settlement infrastructure that actually works at the speed the global economy requires.