Welcome to Settled Up, the Payment Expert podcast series where we get to know the person behind the profession
For our inaugural episode, we speak to Vikram Bharwani, CTO, Banking at NTT DATA UK&I, on the music, films, books, sport and comedy that shape him.
What song do you put on before a big day, and what does it do for you?
Top of my mind is “The Child In Us” by Enigma — one of the best. Enigma generally makes really nice music, and that’s the one I love.
What album can you play start to finish, no skips?
During my University days, my roommate played Pink Floyd‘s The Wall around the clock — “we don’t need no education,” the whole thing. At one point I knew every song on side A and side B of the cassette.
What’s the film or box set you’ll happily rewatch forever?
I don’t watch many films. What I do to unwind is code. With the cloud and Claude Code, honestly, I think I’m addicted — and watching agents write code is a thriller of a movie in itself.
Over the last few months the intelligence of these agents has grown exponentially. I’ll have seven or eight agents working on a task, each one talking to the others: “I’m on this file, please don’t make any changes,” and another replying, “okay, I’ll wait for you.” It’s brilliant.
What’s the book you press on everyone you meet?
Back in 2015-16, the book that stuck with me was The Quantum Universe by Brian Cox. I found it so interesting that I went on to do quantum computing certifications through MIT online, and I’ve been writing articles on my website, qcguy.com, ever since — it gets thousands of visitors a day. I’m still amazed at how the quantum world works, and how different it is from the reality you and I see.
What’s the sporting moment you still go back and rewatch?
I’ve got a nine-year-old who loves every sport going — rugby, football, cricket, table tennis, golf. The one I’ve taken up because of him is golf. The main reason is that I want to keep playing it with my son when I’m old — so old I can’t play any other game. Golf will still be with me.
What’s the funniest thing you’ve ever seen – a sketch, a clip, a stand-up routine?
Back in 2015 I was Global Head of Architecture at a previous company, a guy in the same room was working away, then looked out towards the clouds and asked, completely innocently: “Vikram, this cloud computing thing — is it really in the clouds?”
We’ll be talking to NTT DATA’s Vikram on next week’s Payment Expert podcast – where we’ll explore whether stablecoins, tokenised deposits and the digital euro are meant to coexist, look at which one Europeans actually end up paying with, and which just runs in the background. Join us for the full conversation then.
You can catch up on our latest episode too, where we spoke to Ignas Dovidonis, AML and CTF Compliance Officer at myTU, about what AI agents can already buy and where regulation lags agentic payments. Follow the link here.
