Fintech Projects
Here I bunch up my projects related to Fintech. I got attracted to the Fintech space back in 2012 while interning at RBI (India’s Central Bank). I find some of the problems in this space to be very meaningful. Fintech provides avenues to build a more equitable society by broadening access to opportunities and increasing economic freedom of individuals and small businesses.
Blockchain at Berkeley May 2020 - Feb 2022
In May 2020, I was preparing to start my MBA and was exploring what next in my career. I was looking for areas that were growing and noticed a couple of trends were reinforcing each other: interactive entertainment such as gaming was growing, improved performance of GPUs and Game Engines was making video games more engaging and easy to create, and blockchain tech was seeing more developer activity. The pandemic was further accelerating these trends- directly by forcing people to spend time indoors with interactive forms of entertainment and indirectly by availability of easy money.
During this search, I came across Opportunities for Crypto in Gaming. It caught my attention because this blockchain use-case promised to go beyond speculation. By aligning incentives of all stakeholders, blockchain tech was promising an evolution of business model for the free-to-play gaming industry. I felt someone with my background in finance and economics would be useful in cross-pollinating ideas such as market-making, asset-pricing, etc. to these new paradigms and could play a role in building web3 economies. So, the next two years at Berkeley, I spent some time exploring this space of interdisciplinary problems in greater detail and filling in the gaps in my skill-sets. If interested, you can read more here.
During this search, I came across Opportunities for Crypto in Gaming. It caught my attention because this blockchain use-case promised to go beyond speculation. By aligning incentives of all stakeholders, blockchain tech was promising an evolution of business model for the free-to-play gaming industry. I felt someone with my background in finance and economics would be useful in cross-pollinating ideas such as market-making, asset-pricing, etc. to these new paradigms and could play a role in building web3 economies. So, the next two years at Berkeley, I spent some time exploring this space of interdisciplinary problems in greater detail and filling in the gaps in my skill-sets. If interested, you can read more here.
Northern Arc CapitalJune 2016 - Apr 2020
Northern Arc Capital is an impact-focused investment banking firm in India. Backed by LeapFrog Investments and Fidelity's Eight Roads, the company played a leadership role in enabling growth of the microfinance sector in India.
I was fortunate to have joined the Treasury & CFO office of the company during its hyper-growth stage. The role gave me a ring-side view of how to manage a lending business. I could lead impactful projects such as creating business plan model for the company and also learned to manage company's portfolio of private credit investments. Over time, I was given the responsibility to manage $175+ million across our 7 private debt funds.
This exposure of managing investments helped me identify a recurring problem faced by investment bankers and investment managers in the private credit space. We realized if we could use technology to track the market, we could solve this problem and in turn create a source of competitive-advantage for us. I was excited by the prospect of working on such a Fintech product and therefore, collaborated with different stakeholders to build a first-of-its-kind sales-and-trading product.
This exposure of managing investments helped me identify a recurring problem faced by investment bankers and investment managers in the private credit space. We realized if we could use technology to track the market, we could solve this problem and in turn create a source of competitive-advantage for us. I was excited by the prospect of working on such a Fintech product and therefore, collaborated with different stakeholders to build a first-of-its-kind sales-and-trading product.
Hedwic Oct 2015 - May 2016
Hedwic was a social lending platform to enable access to finance for self-employed millennials in India. It was an attempt to solve the problem of thin-file by re-imagining informal credit systems with technology.
I had been working on a mobile-payments-related-project during my undergrad at BITS Pilani (Goa). I was keen to explore the new possibilities enabled by the launch of IndiaStack- a collection of open APIs to prove one's identity digitally and transfer value (both in real-time). Credit markets in India were (still are?) underpenetrated with interest rates as high as 40% APR. Hedwic was an attempt to re-imgaine the informal credit space with the advent of IndiaStack, increasing penetration of mobile phones and growing affordability of data.