FIDE is a not-for-profit organization
that fosters innovation and co-creation among ecosystem participants, by building interoperable open protocol specifications as a public good. beckn protocol is open source and the ecosystem is free to adopt to build digital infrastructure as public good. By building open protocol specifications, we hope to make all or any form of service available on a beckn enabled network to offer a seamless digital commerce experience to everyone.
- not-for-profit
- design and advocacy for open protocols
- foster open communities
Foundation for Interoperability in Digital Economy (formerly Beckn Foundation) is the genesis author of beckn protocol specification and the angel donor for its evolution. FIDE continues to foster an open community led movement for beckn.
meet the founders
Nandan Nilekani
co-founder
Nandan co-founded Infosys and is the non-executive chairman since 2017. He is the co-founder and chairman of EkStep foundation, a not-for-profit effort to create a learner centric platform to improve literacy and numeracy for millions of children. Nandan is the founding chairman of unique identification authority of India. Fortune magazine conferred with “Asia’s businessman of the year 2003”. In 2005 he received the prestigious Joseph Schumpeter prize for innovative services in economy, economic sciences and politics. Times magazine listed him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2006 & 2009. Foreign policy magazine listed him as one of the top 100 global thinkers in 2010. Nandan is the author of “Imagining India” and co-author of “Rebooting India: realising a billion aspirations”.
Dr. Pramod Varma
co-founder
Pramod is the chief architect and technology advisor for India’s id project – “Aadhaar”. He is also the architect of UPI, digital locker and esign (as part of india stack). Pramod sits on the technology advisory board of several government and regulatory organisations in India like national payment corporation of India, goods and service tax network, securities exchange board of India. Pramod is currently the cto of EkStep foundation. Pramod holds a master’s and ph.d. degree in computer science with a second master’s in applied mathematics. Over the last 25+ years, Pramod has studied architectures spanning from mainframes to web, and his main areas of interest are internet scale distributed architectures and intelligent systems.
Sujith Nair
ceo & co-founder
Sujith Nair is the CEO and Co-founder of FIDE – Foundation for Interoperability in Digital Economy. This not-for-profit organisation is the genesis author and angel donor to an open-source initiative called the Beckn Protocol. Beckn enables the creation of decentralised digital economy ecosystems. Co-founded along with Nandan Nilekani and Dr Pramod Varma, FIDE has been helping Beckn Protocol evolve as an independent and large-scale open-source community effort focusing on its adoption and sustenance as a digital public good.
Sujith conceptualised and helped set up the world’s first decentralised open mobility network using the Beckn Protocol in Kochi called the Kochi Open Mobility Network (KOMN), which was launched in July 2021.
Sujith co-conceptualised the idea of ONDC and onboarded the first set of market participants on ONDC, co-authored the ONDC Strategy Paper and was instrumental in the setup of ONDC Ltd in Dec 2021.
Sujith continues volunteering for KOMN, ONDC and other open network initiatives and is a global advocate for interoperable and decentralised digital ecosystems.
Before FIDE, Sujith headed Management Consulting practices and Internet businesses in urban mobility and digital payments. Sujith has contributed to many key interventions in the Aadhaar program between 2010-2012. Sujith also designed India’s national transit open payments interoperability (One Nation, One Card) in 2014 to integrate ticketing and payments across public transport systems in the country.