Ramkrishna Atre (PFM 2011- 2013), Growth and Partner Operations, Avanti Finance

Q.How has been your journey from IIFM to this role?

A. Unexpected and rewarding at the same time. When I was at IIFM, I pursued my internship at TERI, under Dr. Abhiskek Kar from PFM 07. I joined Fino right after IIFM, and worked in the Operations monitoring team. My first job gave me the opportunity to work with six of my  batchmates. It also provided me valuable experience in the domain. After my short stint at Fino, I wanted to take up more challenging roles. This is when  I joined Annapurna Finance as Manager for Action Research and Product Implementation and worked closely with the leadership, including Mr. Satyajit Das from PFM 07. It was a very interesting role with a mix of market research, new product development, running pilots, driving business, and a lot more.

FGDs in rural areas were always interesting, especially when cows walked in and joined mid discussion.

I was lucky to join the Company at an early stage, and got an opportunity to learn and grow with the Company, from an AUM of ~INR 70 Crs to ~INR 4,500 Cr in a span of over seven years. The role was ever evolving and challenging, with a constant drive towards innovating financial products for the underserved.

I finally moved to Avanti Finance towards the end of 2020 for a fascinating role, with an opportunity to work in a company being promoted by Mr. Nandan Nilekani and Mr. Ratan Tata. It was a major cultural change, moving from a corporate set up to an early-stage start-up. Avanti takes a platform approach towards making financial services available to the underserved, while being Presence less, Paperless and Cashless. The mission demands constant innovation and disruption, in fact Avanti was the first in this space to offer a 100% digital journey. The company aims to provide agency, nativity and affordability to its users. 

It has been a great learning experience working with a wide array of mission-aligned organizations, a journey towards solving the problems in delivery of financial services in a digital and seamless manner.

Q. What were some of the key milestones/learning in this journey that you would like to share with us?

A. A lot of learnings along the way, right from the time I started with my internship. While I was conducting research on the usage and impact of improved cook stoves, I spent a lot of time interacting with women in rural India about their cooking practices, conducting interviews and FGDs. It gave a lot of insight into their lives, what factors drive decisions around cooking practices and fuel usage in rural India. I was lucky to be awarded the Director’s award for best internship for this project.

Further time spent doing market research during my time at Annapurna helped a lot towards getting insights into credit needs of rural India. Conducting socio-economic impact assessments of the micro-credit program built an understanding of what is the contribution of access to credit on microfinance borrowers, what contributes to customer satisfaction and how services can be improved through innovation over time.

One of the products that I developed and launched at Annapurna was MSME finance, targeting the missing-middle segment. The product has now evolved to become a separate vertical in the company, with a major contribution to the company’s AUM. I also pursued a course in SME finance from Frankfurt School, and got a scholarship to be a part of their Winter Leadership Academy in Germany. It was a very enriching experience to be a part of the academy and learn with industry peers from around the world.

Q. What is the most satisfying part of your current role?

A. I got a knack for driving business when I moved on from my previous job. In the current role I get to do that while building products that would be tailor made for partners ranging from Ag-Techs, agri-value chains, FPOs, NGOs, Cooperatives, NBFCs and MFIs. Its challenging as well as satisfying to work with partners, getting them to adopt tech and enable the digital approach towards financial inclusion. As many customers and clients are in rural India, and the ecosystem is more cash based, motivating and enabling them to adopt a digital approach is quite challenging. It is very satisfactory to continuously keep working on solving these problems, processing and transforming tech innovation.

Q. Has your learning at IIFM helped in shaping how you approach your professional roles?

A. It definitely has helped a lot. The learnings from IIFM gave a perspective of rural development, and built towards an approach towards understanding and solving problems for the community. I worked with alumni from across the batches, observed that the people from IIFM have a very different perspective and a deeper level of understanding when it comes to rural development and problems affecting the community, something that a general MBA doesn’t give you. The curriculum at IIFM helped me find my interest areas, as well as enabled me to deliver better in professional roles. The course of Research Design and Evaluation taught by Prof. Advait Edgaonkar was very compelling. It is a lot of what I did and learnt from- conducting Action research and Product Innovation, identification of markets etc. Courses on Social Impact Assessment and Environment Impact Assessment by Ashish Sir and Yogesh Sir were also very  useful when I had to conduct Impact Assessment surveys over the years for the microfinance program of the company. I still use the learnings from GIS taught by CS Rathore sir, as it helps in designing through different BI tools and visualisation of business data. Learnings from different courses on Environment and Development help in numerous other deliverables in professional life.

Q. Who (or what) are the biggest influences or drivers in your careers. What would be your advice to freshers and IIFM graduates who are looking to choose similar sectors/roles?

A. I am lucky to have constant support from my wife, our parents and friends, who are always motivating me to move forward, and go to the next level. The roles being undertaken by our Alumni and the impact they are creating on the society was also a source of inspiration. I have keen interest in how individual finance management can help people and families, and it’s surprising how little, people in general understand about the financial instruments available to them. The accessibility to these instruments is very low when it comes to EWS of individuals and communities. I am fascinated by how product innovation and technology can help bring small but relevant changes in people’s lifestyle and decisions, and potentially have a great socio-economic impact. This drives me to explore, understand, and do more.

Q. What are your favorite memories during your IIFM days?

A. Time spent at IIFM was with many great experiences and memories. Most amazing would be to find my life partner there, Ankita Yadav, who is from the same batch as I am. Later found out that we graduated (engineering) from the same group of colleges and spent four years in the same campus, but never saw each other on account of fate or me bunking most of those classes.

Great times spent with friends at IIFM playing football, learning TT, midnight Counter strike games, rooftop parties, and amazing field trips.

Q. In hindsight, what was the biggest contribution (courses, faculty, library, friends, and alumni. Anything else!!)  or take away from IIFM that you think played a critical role in shaping you as an individual or professional?

A. Friends and peers from IIFM have contributed the most towards my journey both as an individual and professional. They have been a constant source of motivation, inspiration, and  supported constantly through these years. I feel blessed to have found such friends that bring positivity and openly discuss their perspectives. Had a chance to work with some great alumni of ours over the years (Satyajit Das, Sachin Bansal, Suraj Bali), whose work ethics and experience was inspiring and great to learn from.

Q. The best friends / seniors /faculty at IIFM? Some memorable titbit’s that you like to share.

A. Shailesh Acharya and Puneet Dalal were my partners in crime, and we were found mostly tripling on my bike around the campus and the city. Ankita Yadav– my future wife,  with whom I roamed around in the beautiful college campus. Parashar Kemprai was my room neighbour, and also my colleague for over seven years during my job. On a usual day, I would play a random rock song, which he would instantly start playing on his guitar! Debates with Shakti Singh (my TT guru) were (and are) always on another level. Had some of the best times with Abhinav Sen, Amit Maheshwari, Shreyas Joshi, Rahul Sharma (Bob), Arvind Garimella, Vamsi Krishna, Akansha Madnani, Ruchika Bammi, Ankit Singh, Sumeet Heer, Vaibhav Shende and many others. Frankly the list would cover many more. Worked together with my friend Anoop TP from PFM 14 for seven years, and he is one of the most supporting and hardworking people I’ve met.

During our first field trip with Capt. Anil Khare, we were assigned to do FGD/PI with the residents of a village in Kukru Khamla. As usual, Shailesh and I teamed up and conducted multiple discussions. Over the course of the conversation Villagers shared that they have no real source of entertainment, no movies or TV. Last time they had seen a movie was a decade back in the nearby block, and couldn’t recognize names of the most famous celebrities. We were struck by the state of the people, and walked downhill from the village profoundly discussing their lives and state of development. Standing at the foot of the hill, when we looked up, almost all of their homes had dish TV antennas atop their roof. It was then we realised that we had been told stories by the villagers that were far from the truth, a facepalm moment for us. A great learning from the first FGD done.

Q. As an alumnus, what is your advice to freshers or those who are joining IIFM to get the best out of the 2 years there?

A. Interact more with everyone, your batchmates, seniors, juniors, and the great faculties that we have. We have a chance to listen, understand and learn from a group of people from very diverse backgrounds and perspectives.

Also it is important to have a good understanding of general management subjects, from finance to economics and statistics. Whichever role you take up, these would help you understand and deliver more on the professional front.

Q. What is your typical day at the office? 

A. Days are usually packed with meetings and solving problems, a typical start-up environment. A typical day starts with a huddle meet with the team, catching up about the month’s business, operational issues and progress of different projects. This is followed by catch-ups with current and potential partners throughout the day regarding business development and livelihood financing models that can be enabled through the Avanti platform. As I am also looking at Avanti partner’s operations, the day usually ends with working with the team on resolving problems around process and tech faced by field operations.

Q. And how about weekends, Hobbies, Family and anything else you want to add?

A. Weekends are partially spent working :). And rest with my wife when we find something new to cook together, or take a road trip in and around Bangalore, exploring places and food, or meeting with friends.

I have many hobbies, and I like exploring new interests all the time. I love playing Table tennis, pool/snooker, fitness and nutrition. I also enjoy activities like photography, cooking, reading books, learning about financial markets etc.

Q. Favourite Books, movies, authors.

A. I spend a lot of time listening to music wherever I get a chance. I like to explore different genres, but particularly like classic rock, metal music and the oldies (60s, 70s, 80s). I love listening to Bob Dylan.

Some of my favourite books would be The Almanack of Naval Ravikant – Eric Jorgenson, Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play – Mahan Khalsa, George Orwell Classics – 1984, Animal Farm, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams, and the Shiva Trilogy – Amish Tripathi. I also often listen to podcasts on fitness, finance, markets, economics, psychology and human behaviour.

I used to watch a lot of movies and TV series back in the day, but get less time to do so due to my professional commitments. Some of the favourite ones would be:

Movies: The Basketball Diaries, The Departed, I Love You Man, God Bless America, The Invention of Lying, Gangs of Wasseypur, Silence of the Lambs, Parasite, and many more of the classics.

TV Series: Death Note, House MD, The Wire, Oz, The Office (US), Arrested Development, MASH, Rick and Morty, The Twilight Zone.

I also enjoy watching stand ups from Norm Macdonald, George Carlin, Dave Chapelle and Bill Burr.

Q. IIFM is driven by alumni’s passion and commitments towards its goal. How would you like to contribute to IIFM or IIFM alumni, students?

A. Any way that I can. I don’t get an opportunity to visit IIFM that frequently now, but would love to interact more with students on what they can do pertaining to my current sector, and with the Alumni association on the curriculum front.

Q. What do you think is different at IIFM now vs when you studied there? What do you think is a positive change and what is not?

A. As I mentioned, I don’t get to visit the campus that often now, but something very positive if the level of engagement that we see with Alumni through Different Social media groups and state chapters is really great. Addition of one more professional internship to the curriculum was also a welcome change, where students get more exposure to the professional environment, and get a taste of what is required to grow further.

Q. Any suggestions on who you want to get profiled/interviewed here?

A. Many people to be profiled here, but to name a few would be Amit Gupta, Satyajit Das, Sachin Bansal, Shailesh Acharya, Shakti Singh, Anoop TP.