It is with great pleasure that we note that the Governor of the Bank of Mauritius (BoM) Harvesh Kumar Seegolam has been placed among the Top 40 Digital Leaders. As published by The Africa Report, he is at the 40th position. To recall, in August, the Governor of the Bank of Mauritius has received the distinction of the best Central Bank Governor in Africa by the African Business Leadership Awards 2021.
Tech builds the future for Africa’s youth by providing jobs, opportunities and access to knowledge. As the ecosystem gets ever more crowded with talent, The Africa Report launches its first ranking of the digital economy’s power players. If there is one industry that has continued to exceed expectations in Africa, it is telecommunications.
To select 40 from this crowded field was an ambitious undertaking.
It includes telecom operators with hundreds of millions of subscribers, the heads of specialised investment funds and founders of start-ups that have become unicorns, but also African representatives of the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) giants. It also includes some public decision-makers who hold the purse strings on digital infrastructure.
Mr Harvesh Kumar Seegolam was appointed as Governor of the Bank of Mauritius with effect from 1st March 2020. Prior to his appointment as the Governor of the Bank of Mauritius, Mr. Seegolam was the Chief Executive of the Financial Services Commission (FSC) since July 2017.
In his previous position, Mr. Seegolam has spearheaded numerous national initiatives with respect to the development and regulation of Financial Services. He has equally been instrumental in delivering on the national strategy with respect to the 10-year Blue Print for the financial services sector.
Driving a culture of innovation throughout the industry, Mr Seegolam has been at the forefront of the establishment of the National Regulatory Sandbox Licence Committee in 2018, and is a member of the Mauritius Artificial Intelligence Council.
Over the last years, Mr. Seegolam has been a key contributor and a member of various technical committees at the level of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He has driven the setting up of the FSC Regional Centre of Excellence – an initiative launched in collaboration with the OECD – aiming at furthering capacity building and research in the fields of financial services, competition and digital finance in Sub Saharan Africa for regulatory bodies and law enforcement agencies.
Prior to joining the FSC, Mr Seegolam launched and ran the Financial Services Promotion Agency with the mandate of promoting Mauritius as an International Financial Centre. Mr Seegolam has equally been part of the strategic team leading the Board of Investment of Mauritius, now the Economic Development Board, where he was in charge of the Innovation, Technology and Services cluster.
