As regulatory scrutiny sharpens and digital-first businesses grapple with heightened reputational risks, organisations must fundamentally rethink their approach to governance and compliance, said Shalini Chakravorty, Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer at PhonePe, to ETLegalWorld.
Chakravorty said companies need to move away from reactive, manual compliance processes towards what she termed “Compliance-as-Code” governance, where oversight is embedded directly into technology systems and product lifecycles. “Organizations must transition to ‘Compliance-as-Code’ governance and a ‘Tone at the Top’ culture, replacing reactive, manual processes with proactive, embedded oversight,” she said.
According to her, this shift requires leveraging AI-driven risk intelligence to integrate compliance directly into the product lifecycle, transforming governance from a gatekeeper into a strategic catalyst for operational trust.
On responding to digital fraud and compliance incidents, Chakravorty stressed the importance of breaking functional silos. “Effective collaboration between legal, compliance, and technology teams is achieved through a Unified, Cross-Functional Triage,” she said.
“Rather than acting in silos, teams operate under a structured governance framework that treats incident response as a collaborative, multi-disciplinary exercise,” she added, suggesting that the “ensure faster, establishing pre-defined playbooks, automating evidence preservation, and cross-training and defensible responses by establishing pre-defined playbooks, automating evidence preservation, and cross-training.”
Shalini Chakravorty is set to join the ET Legal India White-Collar Crime Forum 2026 on the panel titled “Spotlight Session: AI, Deepfakes & Digital Fraud: The Next Frontier of White Collar Crime Cyber fraud.”
[Please note that the answers reflect her personal views as a speaker and should not be interpreted as the official views or position of her employer or any affiliated organisation.]
