Ajit Desai, PhD

Ajit Desai currently works at the intersection of payment systems, central banking, and emerging technology. His focus is on how AI and tokenization can improve the safety, efficiency, and resilience of financial market infrastructures.

At the Bank of Canada, he leads and contributes to strategic research and experimentation on AI agents, tokenized settlement, wholesale payments, cross-border payments, and next-generation payment systems. His current focus is on building practical insights for central banks as payment systems evolve toward more automated, programmable, and data-driven infrastructures.

He has also worked with the BIS Innovation Hub as an Advisor, where he contributed to international projects on tokenization (Project Agorá), non-traditional data for central bank analysis (Project Neo), and agentic AI in payments (Project Agenti). His broader research includes AI-driven liquidity management, reinforcement learning in payment systems, quantum computing applications for settlement, and the use of non-traditional data for central bank analysis.

Dr. Desai has published numerous research papers in leading academic and professional journals, including Management Science, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (JEDC), Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Payments Strategy & Systems (JPSS), Journal of Financial Market Infrastructures (JFMI), The Journal of Finance and Data Science (JFDS), and ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC).

He holds a Ph.D. in Computational Science and Engineering from Carleton University and an M.S. in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras).