Black Hat India CISO Circle Series Ep. 1- Supply Chain Risk Management- Prajal Kulkarni, CISO, Groww

In this first episode of the Black Hat India CISO Circle podcast, host Ayush, from Black Hat India, sits down with Prajal Kulkarni, CISO at Groww, India's largest retail stock broker with over 80 million registered users and more than 12 million active traders. Prajal built his career in offensive security; penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, web application security, before moving through leadership roles at Flipkart and Cleartrip and into the CISO seat at Groww in 2023. In this episode, Prajal breaks down: The technical-to-leadership shift: why making "game-changing security strategic bets" eventually forces a move out of pure execution Account takeover defense: balancing proactive controls (OTP, device binding, MFA, PIN-based auth like UPI's MPIN) with reactive detection pipelines and account freezing Why third-party risk management is broken: 95% of organizations raised TPRM budgets in 2025, yet 97% still got breached through their supply chain Vendor tiering: treating "tier one" vendors like extended family, and why SOC 2 and ISO 27001 reports are often "security theater" without real collaboration behind them Tool sprawl: consolidating around vendors who solve multiple problems well instead of stacking point solutions Shadow AI in the vendor ecosystem: why TPRM checklists need to catch up as vendors quietly ship AI features with your data What nobody tells you about becoming a CISO: people management, organizational influence, and navigating politics Prajal's take on vendor trust, account security, and the shift into leadership is exactly the kind of ground-level, strategy-first conversation that will anchor the Black Hat India 2026 Summits- where CISOs and CXOs work through the calls behind the headlines, not just the technology. If this conversation resonated, the Summits are where it continues live. Learn more about the Black Hat India 2026 Summits: https://www.blackhat-india.com/summit... Register for Black Hat India 2026 Summits: https://registration.blackhat-india.c...