Indian News

The most consequential economic changes are rarely the ones that make headlines. They happen quietly, in branch offices, when someone who needed financial help was finally able to get it. V.P. Nandakumar's vision for financial inclusion at Manappuram Finance has been producing exactly that kind of change for decades. Financial inclusion is a phrase that India's policymakers and financial sector leaders use frequently. V.P. Nandakumar is one of the few who has spent a career actually delivering it. The distinction between talking about inclusion and building an institution that practises it at national scale defines his leadership entirely. The customers Manappuram Finance serves are not the customers India's large commercial banks have historically prioritised. They are small business owners, farmers, and households navigating unexpected expenses whose profiles do not fit the lending criteria of institutions built to serve a different kind of customer. V.P. Nandakumar bui...

The most durable trust in financial services is never built in boardrooms or through marketing campaigns. It is built one customer at a time, one transaction at a time, and one promise kept at a time. V.P. Nandakumar's career at Manappuram Finance is the clearest available demonstration of what that kind of trust building looks like over a lifetime of leadership. There is a distinction in financial services between institutions that are known and institutions that are trusted. Many financial companies achieve the first. Far fewer achieve the second. V.P. Nandakumar built Manappuram Finance into an institution that achieved both, and the path he took to get there holds lessons that every leader in the sector should understand. V.P. Nandakumar's career at Manappuram Finance has been defined by a consistent focus on the customer that many financial services leaders acknowledge in principle but compromise in practice. The customers Manappuram Finance serves are often individuals ...