Kartik Kumar

I’ve spent my career doing one thing in different rooms: finding the business that’s already there, hiding inside a capability nobody has named yet — and building it.

Across investment banking, private equity, insurance broking, executive search, wealth management, commercial banking, and hedge funds, the pattern has repeated with remarkable consistency. Established firms accumulate genuine, sophisticated capability — in research, in analytics, in domain expertise — and consistently underutilise it. The capability stays a cost center, or a quiet competitive advantage nobody monetises, because nobody made the deliberate decision to turn it into a business.

Most recently, I built a private equity value-added services practice from zero inside a leading global advisory firm — pre-CDD research, portco analytics, transformation advisory, fund operations support — taking it from an idea to a functioning, revenue-generating practice with a global delivery footprint.

What That Build Actually Taught Me

The honest version of that story includes the parts that don’t make it into a credentials deck. I learned what happens when sponsor air cover disappears mid-build. I learned how fast a parent firm’s culture can quietly absorb the talent you spent a year recruiting. I learned that incentive misalignment kills more new practices than bad strategy does. And I learned that adoption — not product quality — is almost always the real constraint on whether a new capability becomes a real business.

Those lessons are the foundation of how I work now. Not theory borrowed from a textbook. Scar tissue from doing it — and from watching enough other firms make the same mistakes I made, faster than they needed to.

Why India, Why Now

A specific observation sits underneath most of what I do: India’s financial knowledge services talent pool — tens of thousands of professionals trained in front-office discipline across investment banking, private equity, and adjacent functions — has been persistently mislabelled as back-office capability. It isn’t. It’s strategic-grade talent operating under the wrong category, at exactly the moment the institutions that housed it are consolidating in ways that don’t value what makes it distinctive.

That combination — genuine capability, mislabelled and currently displaced — is the foundation of how I think about delivery. The work doesn’t just happen to be built with India-based talent. It’s designed around the specific advantage that talent represents, deliberately, rather than incidentally.