Our Vision.

John has deep experience in helping small businesses grow into giants. During his 38 year career, John has been an attorney at Sullivan Cromwell, a Managing Director and Partner at Warburg Pincus and has invested in six transactions that generated 100x returns.

Clarine heads J.P. Morgan’s Export Finance team globally for the Infrastructure sector. Clarine was previously head of trade finance for Africa at Citigroup. She has more than 20 years of experience in corporate and investment banking and has deep experience of providing debt finance to growing businesses in emerging markets.

Sharat is the COO of Policy Bazaar.  Prior to that Sharat was responsible for all of Yatra’s B2C business.  He has over 20 years of experience in a career spanning the internet and FMCG businesses.  Prior to Yatra he was the managing director of TripAdvisor India.  He also launched the Expedia brand in India.  Sharad spent close to a decade in Hindustan Unilever where he set up the globally acclaimed rural initiative – Project Shakti.

Nick is a Professor in Practice in Sustainable Finance at the Grantham Research Institute. He previously led the UNEP Inquiry into the design of a sustainable financial system. Previously Nick was Head of the Climate Change Centre of Excellence at HSBC in London. While at HSBC, Nick was twice rated the #1 analyst for climate change in the Thomson Excel awards for Pan-European investment research.

Aditya, a lawyer, worked at InterGlobe as general counsel before becoming the President & Member of the Board of IndiGo.

Aditya then joined the board of directors at the Nani Palkhivala Arbitration Centre, and became a senior adviser to the Tata Trusts, helping lead its cancer care initiative.

Aditya was CEO of OYO Hotels and now sits on OYOs board. Aditya is also a Member of the Advisory Board and Investor at the VC firm, Homage Ventures.

Cris is an active investor in early-stage companies, mentoring management teams to help them scale.

Named by Institutional Investor as one of the top 40 Fintech investors globally, he currently serves as senior advisor to Accel Partners and Nyca Partners.

Cris is a senior member of the Partnership for NYC’s FinTech Innovation Lab and an Executive in Residence with Accenture at the London FinTech Innovation Lab and has an investment portfolio of 30 companies.

Previously Cris spent 24 years at SunGard, over ten years as President and CEO and is a recognised leader in the field of risk management.

Akbar Khan is CEO India at Rain Instant Pay a US based, earned wages delivered before payday company.  Akbar was previously India CEO at CreditEnable.

Prior to that Akbar served as the CEO and Board Member of Intellegrow, where he was responsible for setting the strategic direction and managing the day to day operations.

Intellegrow was one of the first customers of CreditEnable and provides customized debt finance to SME’s.

Akbar was Managing Director and Head of Corporate Development at GE South Asia and MENAT.

Akbar spent 11 years at Bank of America Merrill Lynch – 7 years in London and 4 years in Mumbai, where he was Head Financial Sponsors Coverage, Client Coverage, Mergers and Acquisitions.

Peter works with Astia Angels, an international angel investing organization whose mission is to fund exceptional, women-led, high-growth ventures.

Peter was Global Head of Risk Analytics & Research at Standard & Poor’s. He led initiatives to develop quantitative models to analyse financial and market securities data, including the use of machine learning, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis of unstructured data to support credit analysis.

He helped launch Standard & Poor’s project finance ratings practice and worked on over $200 billion of power, energy and infrastructure projects. He was the principal author of Standard & Poor’s project finance criteria.

Andy is a seed investor and advisor to the software industry.

In his 30 year career, he has held UK and international senior sales & MD positions in the enterprise software space, including IBM and Siebel Systems and helped take QLIK from start-up to a NASDAQ IPO for $749m in 2010.

Specialises in guiding tech start-ups to high-speed growth and is a mentor and Entrepreneur-in-Residence for over ten incubation & accelerator programs across the UK. He reviews and mentors over 200 companies a year.

He holds an honours degree in Business Information.

Saurav has more than 20 years of experience in finance and forensic audit. He started his career at EY and subsequently held senior finance and audit positions at Deloitte, BP, BG and Barclays. His current remit includes auditing high frequency trading algorithms.

Neil has more than 20 years of financial, corporate and investor communications advisory experience gained through complex global engagements spanning Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe.  He advises large and small companies on their broad stakeholder engagement activities and has a particular expertise in the transition from private to public companies.

David spent over 20 years managing lending operations in emerging markets for Citibank, where he also helped Citibank enter the Brazilian market.  In 2013, David founded the still thriving Indian School Finance Company which lends to low cost private schools across India.

Shailendra is Founder and Chairperson (Trustee) of the Sophia Akash Foundation (SAF). ​

A global leader in online investment banking and trading, Shailendra’s 30-year professional career in technology development, treasury risk management, financial services and investment banking includes the co-founding and international rollout of Saxo Bank.​

Shailendra also participates on a number of Advisory Boards and provides coaching and mentoring to a growing number of bright Social Entrepreneurs.

Richard served as a director of Mercury Asset Management ,Cazenove Capital and Singer and Friedlander before embracing impact investing in 2006 and amongst other things became a trustee of ASTIA .

Between 2005 and 2007, he was a non executive director of Kanbay, which merged with Capgemini Financial Services.

In 2008, he was appointed to the investment and finance committee of one of the UK’s most significant single family offices. He remains in this role from 2014 until earlier this year.  Richard sat on the London School of Economics Investment committee with whom he retains strong ties.

Currently, he is Senior Advisor to the Board of Floreat, having previously been Vice Chairman. Further, he is a trustee for two Charitable foundations and advisor for Tellsons Investors.

Ritu has over 25 years of global experience working on environment and social issues. Ritu was Director of Environment & Social Responsibility at CDC Group, and Director and Senior Advisor to Actis. She is presently Senior Director, Sustainability for Emerging Markets with TPG.

Ritu worked with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and is also the founder and trustee of TERI-Europe.

Ritu has a BA and MA in economics from Delhi School of Economics, and an M.Sc in economics from London School of Economics.

She has specialized in Environmental Economics from Harvard School of International Studies and is a qualified social auditor.

She has been a Board and Investment Committee member of the Global Climate Partnership Fund and an advisory member of Marks and Spencer’s sustainability board.

Claire is an author and investor. She is currently a partner at Magma Partners in Latin America and an angel investor in all geographies. Claire was hired early on by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone to lead social innovation; she was the first employee to write a book about the platform. Named by Fast Company one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business, she holds an MBA and other degrees from Stanford and Oxford.

Derek’s career includes 25 years at Citi, with his most recent role as Managing Director and Global Head of Technology for Treasury and Trade Solutions, ICT and O&T

He has built up a wealth of global, regional and local experience in driving successful delivery of transformation programmes using technology.

He has a passion for using emerging technologies and innovation to improve product delivery, client experience and automation whilst reducing complexity, technical debt and eliminating legacy platforms.

Matthew Crummack is an experienced executive having led the transformation of big consumer-facing digital brands across different geographies. Matthew was the Group CEO of GoCo Group plc prior to its sale in 2021 to Future plc for $794m, and the CEO of lastminute.com Group where he led the turnaround of the business prior to its sale to Bravofly Rumbo Group for $120m in 2015.

Previously Matthew was Senior Vice President of Lodging at Expedia, managing the supply of hotels and transportation inventory for the global group, and started his career in consumer goods across Europe at Procter & Gamble and Nestle.

Matthew also serves as a Senior Non-Executive Independent Director at National Express plc, a Non-Executive Director and advisor to London start-up Kidadl and as a Member of Aston University’s Advancement Board. Matthew received a BSc in International Business and Modern Languages from Aston University and in 2016 was made an Honorary Doctor of Science.