As Director of Program Management at a global payments leader, Nidhi Mahajan directed the industry-wide implementation of the ISO-mandated 8-digit Bank Identification Number (BIN) expansion, a regulatory change that reshaped how transactions are routed across the global payments ecosystem.
In response to concerns over BIN exhaustion driven by surging card issuance, digital wallets, and token proliferation, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) issued a global mandate: beginning in April 2022, all new Bank Identification Numbers (BINs) must expand from 6 to 8 digits under updated ISO/IEC 7812-1 and 7812-2 standards. The change aimed to future-proof transaction routing by increasing available Issuer Identification Numbers (IINs) from 1 million to 100 million.
Though largely invisible to consumers, this shift required every major financial institution, card network, acquirer, processor, and gateway to reconfigure their systems from transaction logic to tokenization, fraud filters, and merchant enablement layers.
Mahajan coordinated updates across more than a dozen core systems, including token orchestration, fraud detection, partner APIs, issuing platforms, and compliance databases, while aligning hundreds of partner-facing systems to move in sync. Her work ensured that financial institutions could adopt the new standard without disruption, turning a high-risk regulatory mandate into an orderly industry-wide transition.
“The challenge wasn’t just the code, it was aligning a fragmented industry at scale,” said a senior executive familiar with the initiative. “Nidhi brought clarity and command to a mission that required both precision and diplomacy.”
To support the rollout, she helped design readiness tools, test plans, and public-facing enablement guides later referenced by thousands of financial institutions. The industry-wide FAQ portals and service provider kits originated through workstreams she directed, helping the ecosystem modernize in lockstep. While card networks and processors executed their own compliance upgrades individually, the frameworks built under Mahajan’s leadership became a template for regulatory delivery at ecosystem scale. Her approach is now referenced as a benchmark for cross-organizational coordination in highly regulated, fast-moving environments.
The BIN modernization did not end Mahajan’s influence in compliance and governance. It was the starting point for a wider contribution. In the years that followed, she began shaping the conversation through peer-reviewed publications that drew directly from her field experience. Her 2023 article A Predictive Framework for Adaptive Resource Allocation and Risk-Adjusted Performance in Engineering Programs introduced new approaches to balancing resources and risk in complex environments. Building on this foundation, in 2024 she published Strategic Governance of Digital Tokenization for Scalable B2B Payment Infrastructure in the Journal of Information Systems Engineering and Management, translating lessons from BIN modernization into governance models for tokenization. Later that same year, her article AI-Enabled Risk Detection and Compliance Governance in Fintech Portfolio Operations appeared in Computer Fraud & Security, expanding the discussion to the role of artificial intelligence in compliance oversight.
By 2025, Mahajan was expanding this trajectory into new areas. Her forthcoming publications, Governance of Cross-Functional Delivery in Scalable Multi-Vendor Agile Transformations and Regulatory Implications of AI, Machine Learning, and Big Data in Financial Services, demonstrate how her insights now span the intersection of regulation, technology, and large-scale program delivery.
From directing one of the most ambitious regulatory upgrades in global payments to shaping peer-reviewed frameworks on tokenization, AI governance, and cross-functional delivery, Mahajan’s career reflects a steady progression: turning regulatory mandates into opportunities for modernization. Today, she is recognized not only for leading programs that safeguard the stability of financial systems but also for contributing models that influence how industries worldwide approach compliance, technology, and governance. Her work continues to guide how organizations adapt to regulation at scale and how global financial infrastructure evolves for the future.
First Published: 6th June, 2023
