Conservatives, not cowboys

THE PLATFORM AIMS TO ATTRACT FIRST-TIME INVESTORS WITH LOW-TICKET, RELATIVELY SAFE BONDS, AND THEN EDUCATE THEM ABOUT ASSET DIVERSIFICATION

- AYANTI BERA

IN 2011, WHILE many of his third-year IIT Roorkee peers were preparing for plush tech jobs, Anshul Gupta found himself drawn towards finance — something far removed from his electrical engineering syllabus. Born and raised in a middle-class household in Dehradun, Gupta’s career initially had one simple goal: secure a stable,well-paying job that would improve the financial well-being of his family.“My interests in life were secondary at that point,’ Gupta says.

Thus the placement season in his final year brought him to Oracle in Hyderabad as a coder. But a CFA Level 1 certificate and a growing fascination for capital markets soon nudged him out of that role. “My interest was in finance, so why was I wasting time coding?” he recalls. Over the next two years, Gupta completed all levels of the CFA, took the FRM Level 1, and landed at Deutsche Bank in structured finance - his first real taste of the sector.

A year later, he moved to IFMR Capital (now Northern Arc Capital), where he stayed for five years, eventually heading product development in structured finance. Here, Gupta was in the thick of debt-market innovations - executing India’s first covered bond transaction, the first revolving securitisation post-2012 RBI guidelines, and several other first-of-its-kind deals, many even trademarked by Northern Arc.

“We were doing transactions worth ~25,000 crore over those years, but they were only accessible to large institutions and ultra-rich family offices,” he says.