Two Decades of Fintech Leadership: From a Trading Desk in London to ET Now Pro

In 2016, ET Now named me a Leader of Tomorrow.

A decade later, I'm sitting inside Times Network, building the fintech business that same channel now runs. We recently closed the acquisition of Opigo, expanding ET Now into investing and wealth-tech through ET Now Pro.

I don't think I could have planned that symmetry if I'd tried.

But it felt like the right moment to do something I don't do often: look back at two decades of building fintech products, and try to understand what's actually been consistent underneath all the pivots.

Where It Actually Started

Most fintech ceo and founders my age have a "started a wallet in 2015" origin story. Mine starts earlier, and further from consumer tech than people usually expect.

In 2008, I built an index arbitrage tool for the commodity exotics desk at Merrill Lynch in London. In 2010, I built a self-serve investment platform for exotic options trading across the DAX, the FTSE, and their underlying components. In 2012, back in India, I built a multi-asset structured product platform — technically sound, commercially dead on arrival, because regulation shifted underneath it before it could launch.

More on that later. It turns out that market timing and regulation are the most useful things I know about fintech.

Building Payments From a Problem I Was Actually Living

PayLo didn't start on a whiteboard. It came out of a specific, expensive problem I was living daily at Foodpanda — the payment gaps in cash-on-delivery e-commerce.

I didn't build a product first and expand from there. In 2015, I acquired Ruplee, an existing in-restaurant payments company, and pivoted its team and technology into what became PayLo. There was no product on day one. The acquisition was the starting point.

What followed came quickly. In-store payments collection in the wake of demonetisation, which evolved into what became India's first omnichannel payments platform. An interoperable 'One' QR code across mobile wallets, integrated with BharatQR, years before UPI made interoperability a mandate. An interoperable crypto wallet across exchanges — right before the RBI banned crypto altogether.

Here's the part I still find remarkable. The offline payment products we built right after demonetisation were ignored by large businesses at the time. The same category — QR-first, omnichannel, in-store digital collection — became table stakes for every retailer in India during Covid, built by other players who arrived four years later.

We'd already shipped the playbook. The market just wasn't ready to read it yet.

PayLo was eventually acquired.

Insurance, Investment, and a Thesis That Got Acquired

During my sting with Zee, Essel Finance acquired Bimadirect, expanding the group into insure-tech. This wasnt my first encounter with insure-tech. Back in 2005, I was building the core insurance stack for claim processing for health insurance providers in US. Things have a way of coming back to me it seems...

At Essel Finance, we were also working on Zee Money, an attempt to build a financial investment and transaction aggregation platform across Essel and Zee's audience base. It was a content-to-commerce idea before I had a name for it.

Zee Money never launched. Essel Finance was acquired before it could. I've learned to not lose heart when such things happen and understand that sometimes a thesis needs a different home.

Proving the Thesis at Scale

That home turned out to be Network18. Working on Moneycontrol, I built a blueprint to evolve it into a fintech platform through transaction integration — brokerage, mutual funds, and financial product distribution layered onto India's largest financial content destination. While the strategy charted out was much larger than what you see on the platform today, I think the dominant presence of their parent company's fintech brand 'Jio Finance' led them Network18 to curtail their fintech ambitions.

The Zee Money idea I couldn't ship in 2018 finally got proven here. Media and financial content aren't just top-of-funnel marketing for fintech. Done right, they're the distribution moat.

Full Circle at ET Now Fintech CEO

In January 2023, within three months of joining Times Network, I launched ET Now on digital. In under three years, we built it into a large, trusted business news platform (#3 on ComScore), and then did what I'd been rehearsing for a decade: turned that trust into a fintech business.

We built consumer reach through content first. We expanded into a distribution business for credit. And now, with the acquisition of Opigo, we've moved into invest-tech and wealth-tech, giving retail investors access to research, trade ideas, and community alongside ET Now's journalism.

It's the same content-to-commerce architecture from Moneycontrol. The same distribution-through-trust instinct from PayLo. The same acquisition muscle from Ruplee and Bimadirect. Applied here, at a scale none of the earlier ventures had access to.

And it happens to be the same platform that called me a Leader of Tomorrow, ten years ago. I'm not sure there's a cleaner way to show a thesis held up than to end up building it, for real, inside the place that first bet on you.