The first revealing artifact in Amitaabh Malhotra’s career is not a payment terminal. It is a steering wheel. In the mid-1990s, while earning a master’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, Malhotra worked at the university’s Transportation Research Institute on a networked driving simulator. One technical report credits him with improving the steering-wheel torque motor control system. Another says he implemented the torque-control algorithm. The object was modest but the problem was durable: make a complicated machine respond in a way that feels natural to a person.
Thirty years later, Malhotra works with a different sort of human-machine handshake. As Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Wink, he leads the company’s global sales organization, channel development and enterprise partnerships. Wink sells biometric identity and payments technology that recognizes faces, palms and voices across checkout settings. A restaurant kiosk, a payment terminal, a phone or a car may look nothing like a driving simulator. The quiet ambition is related. The user acts; the system understands; the machinery recedes.
Before the phone became the wallet
After Michigan, Malhotra moved into mobile communications at Lucent Technologies and Bell Labs, working on new product introductions for wireless networks. The résumé then travels through superconducting wireless equipment and mobile data optimization before settling on the problem that has occupied most of his public career: how money moves when the consumer is holding a connected device.
In 2007, Malhotra co-founded DeviceFidelity with Deepak Jain and Sydney Smith Hicks. The timing was awkward in the productive sense. Smartphones were spreading, but contactless payment hardware was not yet standard. DeviceFidelity built secure microSD cards and iPhone cases that could add near-field communication to devices that lacked it. Today, an accessory that helps a phone tap to pay sounds like a relic from an alternate universe. Then, it was a bridge between the phone people owned and the payment system they might someday use.
The work demanded more than a neat circuit. Banks, card networks, manufacturers and carriers all had a claim on the experience. DeviceFidelity entered field tests with Visa and worked with U.S. Bank, Monitise and Datacard. In 2012, the company and SpringCard launched moneto, a prepaid mobile wallet for iPhone and Android. The iPhone version came with a protective case containing the microSD hardware. The Android version used a card and a small antenna booster. Elegant? Not quite. Deployable? Yes. The future is often first delivered with an adapter.
“We aim to bring the speed, interactivity and security of mobile contactless payments to a user’s preferred device.”Amitaabh Malhotra, during a Visa and U.S. Bank trial, 2010
That phrase, “preferred device,” is the hinge. Malhotra’s work has repeatedly begun with the hardware, software and habits already in the room. DeviceFidelity did not wait for every phone maker to include NFC. It supplied the missing piece. The approach produced major trials, investor interest and an acquisition: Kili Technology bought DeviceFidelity in 2014 and kept Malhotra and Jain managing the division. Square acquired Kili the following year.
Driving-simulator software and steering feedback at the University of Michigan.
Plug-in NFC, mobile-wallet hardware and bank-network partnerships at DeviceFidelity.
Contextual commerce, loyalty and retailer-owned experiences at Omnyway.
Revenue, partnerships and market development at Wink.
From the tap to the context
At Omnyway, which Malhotra co-founded in 2014, the hardware problem became a retail problem. A payment could be mobile and still feel detached from the rest of shopping. Omnyway built technology that retailers could integrate into their existing apps and back-end systems, combining checkout with loyalty, offers and product discovery. Its platform powered Kohl’s Pay. In 2017, the company announced a $12.75 million Series A led by Nyca Partners, CommerzVentures and the CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund, with Commerce Ventures and Industry Ventures participating.
Malhotra’s public writing and interviews in that period reveal the commercial thesis. He argued that mobile payments covered far more than moving card credentials onto a phone. In China, Alipay and WeChat Pay had become “superapps,” he observed, folding shopping, gifts, bills, rides, appointments, restaurants and hotels into one interface. The interesting unit was no longer a transaction. It was a connected sequence of intent, promotion, loyalty and payment.
Omnyway’s Zapbuy product pushed that sequence outside the store: scan a code in an advertisement and buy the item. A published international patent application names Malhotra among the inventors of a “virtual-to-physical payment adapter.” The language is lawyerly; the recurring instinct is plain. Wherever interest appears, shorten the distance to action.
The credential becomes a person
Malhotra joined Wink in 2022 as its revenue and partnerships lead and became Chief Sales and Marketing Officer in 2025. He was returning to work beside Jain, his DeviceFidelity co-founder, but the technical center had shifted. At DeviceFidelity, a secure element made an unequipped phone capable of presenting a payment credential. At Wink, a combination of face, palm, voice and device recognition is intended to make identity itself part of the authorization layer.
The distinction is easy to bury beneath a snowdrift of fintech nouns. In practical terms, Wink wants one recognition event to do several jobs. A customer approaches a kiosk. The system recognizes a consenting user, checks eligibility where required, retrieves a bound payment token, applies loyalty and completes the transaction. The card rails can remain where they are. The visible ritual changes.
A demonstration Malhotra highlighted at the 2026 National Restaurant Association show supplied the most congenial example: a margarita ordered by palm, with check-in, payment, age verification, loyalty, offer redemption and fraud mitigation converging into one scan. It is difficult to make compliance sound festive. A margarita helps.
The partnerships show how he operates. In early 2026, Wink, Sunmi and Qualcomm announced work to bring face and palm checkout onto Sunmi’s Android payment devices using edge processing and existing cameras. Malhotra framed the effort as a move from experiment to “production-ready, identity-native checkout.” The sales job here is architectural. It requires aligning a biometric layer, chip capabilities, terminal makers, payment providers and merchants without asking the shopper to admire the scaffolding.
“Biometric identity is no longer an experiment - it’s becoming the foundation of modern commerce.”Amitaabh Malhotra, March 2026
Who authorized the agent?
The newest chapter removes the shopper from the immediate scene. As AI agents begin to book, buy and transfer on a person’s behalf, an old payments question returns in stranger clothing: who said yes? In March 2026, Wink and identity-verification company Vouched announced an integration designed to anchor an agent’s action to a verified human. The proposed flow binds a deliberately scoped payment token - limited by merchant, amount and use - to the agent’s authorization.
Malhotra called agentic commerce “the new frontier of checkout” and argued that it required a new frontier of trust. The expression is promotional, as expressions in a partnership announcement tend to be. But the underlying question deserves its drama. Passwords establish knowledge. Possession factors establish control of a device. Neither necessarily establishes that a living person intended this particular machine action at this particular moment.
It is the latest version of the preferred-device problem. First, make the phone someone already carries capable of paying. Then make the retailer’s existing app capable of connecting payment to the rest of shopping. Then make the cameras already embedded in commerce hardware capable of recognizing a customer. Now make software acting on someone’s behalf carry evidence of that person’s bounded permission.
The work between the boxes
Malhotra’s formal role sits across sales and marketing, but his career refuses the tidy division between technical and commercial work. He trained as an electrical engineer. He has operated companies, advised startups, written about retail and been named on a payment patent. Colleagues’ public recommendations describe a collaborative leader with technical fluency, positive energy and a habit of keeping communication open while constantly traveling. His public profile lists English, Hindi and Punjabi, plus working Spanish. Translation, literal and professional, appears to be part of the job.
The evidence also offers a small correction to the standard innovation story. Breakthroughs look clean in hindsight because history throws away the adapters. DeviceFidelity’s sleeves and microSD cards seem ungainly only because NFC eventually disappeared inside the phone. Yet those intermediate objects allowed banks, networks and consumers to rehearse the behavior before the hardware became ordinary. Omnyway’s integrations made retailer-controlled mobile commerce work without requiring a merchant to replace everything underneath it. Wink’s present pitch follows the pattern: add identity across existing payment rails and camera-equipped devices.
This is less the romance of invention than the craft of adoption. The decisive work happens between boxes on an architecture diagram, where one company’s elegant product meets another company’s old system, a regulator’s requirement and a customer who simply wants lunch. Malhotra has spent three decades in those gaps.
There is an amusing symmetry in the journey. The graduate engineer once tuned a steering wheel so a simulated road would feel more convincing. The executive now argues for checkout in which the credential feels less visible. Both depend on feedback, timing and trust. Both succeed when the person stops thinking about the interface and continues with the day.