Builder of businesses, and of the people who run them.
Close to thirty years leading retail mortgages and affordable housing across India's banks, housing finance companies and small finance banks, from the metros to Tier 2, 3 and 4 markets.
Currently writing The Architecture of Indian Retail Lending, a practitioner's handbook drawn from a career on the floor.
System, Risk and Discipline: a practitioner's manual
It began as a set of notes to myself. After a career inside the Indian retail lending system, originating, underwriting, collecting, restructuring and writing off loans, I found that the things I knew most deeply were the things least often written about.
Not the regulation or the balance-sheet mechanics, which are well covered, but how the system actually behaves under pressure, where risk really lives, and why two institutions with the same borrowers and the same rules produce entirely different outcomes.
The book is a diagnostic mirror for the people who run these institutions: the collections architecture that separates a 1.5% GNPA lender from a 3.5% one on identical portfolios, the fraud that looks like business as usual until it does not, the risk function quietly designed into irrelevance. Written from the floor up, and not sanitised.
EditionsTwo audience-specific editions are drawn from the same source: an Investor's Edition, for those evaluating Indian lenders from outside, and a Consultant's Edition, for advisory firms engaging with the sector.
How the modern mortgage was born, broke and was rebuilt, from the Depression to 2008 to India's own tests.
Structure, economics and regulation, from the regulator as parent to the manufacture of affordability.
How institutions actually work: funding, the rating game, underwriting, collections, fraud, the month-end machine.
The pandemic stress test, the microfinance crisis, failure autopsies, the HDFC standard, and building an HFC today.
Chapters include The Rating Game, Collections Architecture, The Month-End Machine, Fraud Typologies, Early Warning Signals, Failure Autopsies, and The HDFC Standard.
The handbook is not circulated in full. Tell me the problem you are working on, and I will share the chapter or two that speak to it most directly. The more specific the question, the more useful the reply.
I have spent my career in the parts of lending that decide whether ordinary households get a fair chance: the affordable home loan, the small business loan, the informal-income borrower a credit model struggles to read.
My work has run across origination, credit, collections, risk and product, in senior leadership at ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, DHFL, IIFL Housing Finance and Utkarsh Small Finance Bank, and as the founder of a greenfield housing finance company in Tanzania.
I am known as much for building people as businesses. Three of those I have backed and mentored now lead housing finance companies of their own as managing director or chief executive, something I count among the work I am proudest of.
I am currently on a planned break, open to managing director and chief executive mandates in the HFC and NBFC space, and advising selectively through Duxfin.
A fuller chronology, with exact titles and dates, is on my LinkedIn.
Reading the borrower a scorecard cannot: cash-flow underwriting, ground-level collections design, and lending that works in Tier 2, 3 and 4 markets.
Funding and partnership structures, and the credit design that lets a book scale without quietly leaking.
A record of growing operators into chief executives. The "talent factory": three former colleagues now lead HFCs as MD or CEO.
An in-progress practitioner's handbook on the architecture of Indian retail lending, written from the floor up rather than the framework down.
A boutique advisory to lenders and investors in the housing finance and NBFC space. Clear direction, sound judgement.
Visit duxfin.com →A Varanasi-based foundation building capability, not dependence, across education, self-reliance, healthcare and legal aid.
Visit lolafoundation.in →For board, chief executive and advisory conversations, or simply to compare notes on the road ahead for retail lending.