Finance is not a department you can run from a distance.

I qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1997, a rank holder at the Foundation level. Before that, a B.Com in Statistics from R. A. Podar College and a Diploma in Business Finance from ICFAI.

I started at GRUH Finance, the housing finance company, then a subsidiary of HDFC. I went in as regional head of accounting, moved on to raising deposit funds, spent a lot of time streamlining systems and processes, and ended up on the regional office's loan approving committee. I was doing freelance research for CRISIL on the side. Two things started there and never stopped: an interest in how a process is built rather than only in what it produces, and a habit of taking on work nobody had thought to give me.

In 1999 I joined a healthtech company called CBay Systems as its first employee in India. Eight years after that I was its Group CFO. The business had become the third largest medical transcription company in the world, with over 5,000 people across the US and India, and I was splitting my time between the two countries. I built the MIS, the dashboards and the executive reporting, and I had a small software team dedicated to finance working with me on billing and automation. In 2007 we took the company public on London's AIM market. I was one of the youngest CFOs to list a company.

None of that was planned as a sequence. But one habit ran through all of it. Whenever something was being built, I walked over to the people building it. Every business I have worked in, I sat with the engineering team on the applications that actually ran the place.

Most finance people are handed the output of a system and asked to explain it. I always wanted to be in the room when it was designed.

SuperCFO, and a category that did not exist

In 2008 I left to start SuperCFO. The idea was simple and, at the time, unsellable. A growing company needs a CFO's judgement long before it can carry a CFO's salary. So give it that judgement in a fraction of the time.

India had no market for this. Every early conversation started with me explaining the words. SuperCFO became one of the first firms in the country to offer virtual, outsourced, interim and part-time CFO solutions. Profitable from year one, and since then hundreds of companies, from pre-seed startups to PE-backed and listed businesses. I should be clear that I have not done any of this alone. SuperCFO is a team of CFOs, and most of the work that matters is theirs.

That work has run across technology and SaaS, healthcare, manufacturing, services, trading, retail, D2C and B2B. And across a lot of airports. Working with finance teams in several countries teaches you quickly that the accounting is never the difficult part.

I have worked with investors across the spectrum, from angels and venture funds to private equity, hedge and impact investors, usually on behalf of a portfolio company that needed its finance function to grow up in a hurry. I have also done finance and structuring work for premium and luxury brands as they were launched in India, among them Calvin Klein, French Connection, Gucci, Jimmy Choo and T.M. Lewin, and I served on the board of Tommy Hilfiger in India.

In 2010 the president of the SME Chamber of India asked me, in the middle of a conversation about something else, to put together a white paper and to have it ready in about a week. I wrote it in seventy-two hours. Good Governance, Business Ethics and SME Stock Exchange was released by C. B. Bhave, then Chairman of SEBI, on 9 July 2010, at the Chamber's fifteenth Foundation Day in Mumbai, on a stage that also had the chief executives of the BSE and MCX-SX on it. A few newspapers picked it up afterwards.

I have never been sure whether that says more about the paper or about how little else had been written on the subject at the time.

Somewhere in that period I started writing and speaking about the work, mostly because the same questions kept coming back. A friend had been telling me for years to post something every day. I kept deferring it. When I finally started, it turned into a SuperCFO group on LinkedIn of more than 268,000 finance professionals, a Top Voice badge, and a place in the first cohort of the LinkedIn Creator Accelerator Program in India, one of 200 selected.

There is one thing I am unreasonably fussy about, and it is how a file is built. Input cells and formula cells separated. Colour coded, formatted, structured, so somebody can pick it up in five years and still follow it. It does not matter whether it is a simple schedule or an acquisition model for a fund raise. It takes longer the first time and it saves years afterwards. I have run corporate training on it. What I did not expect is how often people still tell me they are running files I built for them a decade ago.

The same argument applies to what the numbers are for. A report that does not produce an insight somebody can act on has not finished its job. Ratios, charts, the shape of the trend, and the narrative underneath it. And, just as importantly, who is doing what and what the team is planning next, which is the part conventional reporting almost always leaves out.

Why I ended up building software

I did not come to software late. I started coding in high school, and I studied programming and design alongside my B.Com and my CA. For most of my career the two halves ran in parallel. I did the finance, and I stayed close to the people building the systems.

Since 2008 I have reviewed finance systems at hundreds of companies. Evaluated the options, written the requirements, built tools where nothing existed, and been called in more than once when an implementation had already gone wrong. At a few clients the IT team reported to me while we made the change, because the change was not really a technology change.

So when this generation of AI arrived, commissioning a pilot and waiting for a demo was never going to satisfy me. I could not make sense of the claims being made about AI and finance without building with the tools myself. Since early 2025 that has meant building with them most days. I do not type the code any more. Agents write it, I direct them, and the work is in knowing what to ask for, reading what comes back and refusing it when it is wrong. I am not a trained engineer, and I have learned more from the things that broke than from anything I read.

The first thing I shipped was the Super CFO GPT, an assistant for finance, accounting, tax, legal and compliance work. It has since run more than 50,000 conversations and holds a 4.4 rating across more than a thousand ratings, and it was reviewed independently by theCFOai, which found it surfaced conclusions the base model did not know to emphasise. A lot of the early thinking for what came next was tested there.

What came next is FinPera: a multi-tenant, enterprise-grade AI platform for finance teams and professionals in practice — CAs and CPAs, auditors, lawyers, company secretaries and the rest of the people a business relies on. Real permissions, tenant isolation, audit trails. I designed the architecture and I am in it every day. I presented it at the ICAI AI Innovation Summit 2026 at Bharat Mandapam. We built through 2025, incorporated in May 2026, and are launching in India and the USA together.

I know how this reads. A finance person saying he writes his own software is a claim, not a credential. The only useful answer is the product and the writing, which is most of what this site is for.

Away from the desk

In 2021 we released Shrimad Rajchandra, India's first Gujarati animated feature film. I directed it, and worked on the strategy, planning and distribution. It came out in Gujarati, Hindi and English, played in more than a hundred cities across India and the USA, and won a Jury Special Award at the Gujarati Iconic Film Awards in 2022.

We built our own animation studio in Bengaluru, in a banquet hall we converted. The score is an orchestral fusion rather than a Bollywood soundtrack, and the background music and the Foley for the whole film were mixed at a Dolby Atmos approved studio. Then we had to sell it, which nobody had prepared us for. Cinemas sell seats. We sold whole shows, under a campaign called Good Karo, Show Book Karo, and it worked well enough that we ran houseful with PVR, INOX and Cinepolis. It has been on YouTube for nearly five years and people still watch it every day.

The film is a biopic told through ordinary incidents. His business, his letters, his meetings with people like Mahatma Gandhi and Jamsetji Tata. We made it because we wanted to put a life of business conducted ethically in front of people, and see whether that moved anyone. I do not think it is separate from the rest of this page. It is the same argument, made in a different medium.

I mentor entrepreneurs and family business owners on strengthening a business through its finance function, and on building a decision-making process that runs on good information rather than instinct. I have sat in rooms with three generations of the same family, working out a path that aligns everyone's interests, separates the emotion from the logic, and leaves behind something scalable and process-driven. I care a great deal about structure, systems, process and getting things right, sometimes more than is reasonable. I live and work in Mumbai, with a family who come before all of this.