Businessnext appoints Hitesh Sahijwaala to lead APAC and MEA expansion

Businessnext has appointed Hitesh Sahijwaala as Head of APAC and MEA, signalling a major push to expand its autonomous banking footprint across Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa.

In his new role, Sahijwaala will lead market expansion, strategic partnerships, enterprise sales and delivery across the regions. The appointment comes as financial institutions increasingly shift from digital transformation towards AI-native and autonomous operating models.

Growth moment

The move arrives at a pivotal time for the banking and financial services sector. Banks, insurers and non-banking financial companies across India, the GCC and Southeast Asia are redesigning front and middle-office operations around agentic AI.

These systems go beyond generating insights. They can execute tasks end-to-end, from relationship management and lending decisions to customer servicing and operational workflows.

Sahijwaala joins Businessnext with more than three decades of experience in enterprise technology. His career spans BFSI software, cloud infrastructure and SaaS. He has held leadership positions at Salesforce, Red Hat, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, OpenText and IBM, where he built high-performing teams and led transformation initiatives for Fortune 500 organisations.

Regional ambitions

"As Businessnext scales across APAC and MEA, we need a leader who understands both the economics of enterprise banking technology and the regulatory texture of each market," said Nishant Singh, CEO and Co-founder, Businessnext. 

He further added, "Hitesh has built businesses from the ground up, closed some of the most complex transformation deals in the region, and earned trust in the C-suites of the institutions we serve. He is the right leader for this next phase of growth."

The appointment underscores Businessnext's ambition to strengthen its presence across high-growth financial markets and help institutions accelerate AI adoption at scale.

Autonomous future

"Financial institutions across APAC and MEA are at a genuine inflection point — the question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how fast they can move from pilots to production at scale, inside their regulatory guardrails," said Sahijwaala.

"Businessnext has built a differentiated autonomous banking platform that connects customer intelligence to enterprise execution in a way the industry hasn't seen before. 

“I look forward to partnering with Financial Services across the region to unlock the next era of banking — where AI agents do the work, not just the analysis,” he mentioned.

With financial institutions across the region accelerating AI adoption, businessnext is positioning itself to play a larger role in helping banks, insurers and NBFCs transition from digital operations to autonomous, AI-driven enterprises.