I feel incredibly fortunate to have witnessed first-hand transformation of inclusive finance in the past decade and half. Trained in banking, I quickly shifted to development finance because I wanted to do something more meaningful. I worked in funding public private partnerships in health and education as part of the Social Initiatives Group at ICICI Bank. When market based approaches began evolving, I was part of a start up team, supported by ICICI Bank, that began working on access to livelihoods, but I moved on to focusing on the use of finance as a tool for social change.
I joined the founding team at IFMR Mezzanine Finance at a time when the microfinance sector in India was rapidly evolving and needed access to different types of innovative capital. After working with the team for five years and rising to the role of CEO, I shifted to deepening my understanding of customer behaviour and insights on low usage of financial products and services. I worked on customer centric business models for five years as an independent consultant, before coming back to school to earn a masters in international relations where I focused on the financial lives of migrants, social change, systems thinking, and institutional change management.
While I believe in the power of finance for good, I think systems that are needed to drive equity of various kinds are broken. We need to redesign these, if we have to achieve the goals of overall well-being and inclusive growth. My areas of interest are around understanding how we can redesign these systems and include excluded populations like women, refugees, migrants and small business owners.
I earned a Masters in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, a PGDBM (MBA) from MDI Gurgaon, and a Bachelors degree in Mathematics from Wilson College, Mumbai University.
I received the Chevening Fellowship for Leadership and Excellence in 2014 from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK and was a Young Fellow sponsored by the Council of United States and Italy in 2017. I am currently a Senior Fellow at the Henry J Leir Institute, housed within the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
I research organizational practices, incentives and impact of fintechs, platforms and digital financial services on low income customers. I am also interested in emerging risks in this space and identifying tech innovations that can help with market monitoring and suptech/regtech.