The women of India's money machine

Summary: 'We need to get it out of our heads that we are expected to be superwomen.' Six senior women in India's mutual fund industry on what they actually learned—about work, and about themselves.

This Women’s Day, Value Research asked six senior women from India’s mutual fund industry a different question, not what they have achieved, but what they have actually learned. About the work. About themselves. About what it truly takes to last.

The answers were not rehearsed. They were the kind of lessons that only come after years of doing the work.

The story you tell about yourself

Usha Raman has spent three decades in finance, from JPMorgan to heading internal audit at India’s largest mutual fund, and today serves as Chief Compliance Officer and Company Secretary at quant Mutual Fund. The advice she most wants younger women to hear has little to do with technical skills.

“Before you enter the room, people already know who you are,” she says. “Whether we want that story to be the way Google tells it, or whether we want to create that story entirely ourselves, that choice is ours.”

Women, she observes, often do the work, collect the wins, and then stay quiet about it. Personal branding is not vanity, she argues. In a competitive industry, it is survival.

Her professional conviction runs just as deep. “We always follow the path of ethics and principle-based regulations,” she says. In her experience, that path and the right business outcome are rarely as far apart as people assume.

The confidence nobody handed her

Aparna Karmase has spent more than 24 years in compliance across ICICI Prudential, BNP Paribas, Invesco and now Motilal Oswal AMC, where she heads compliance, legal and secretarial functions. She believes being a woman in a role that requires telling uncomfortable truths to powerful people can actually be a strength.

“As women, we are often prepared to set the right tone, whether in a family or an organisation,” she says. “If we are confident that we are acting in the interest of investors and the organisation, we can explain this clearly to stakeholders.”

That confidence came from understanding not just what regulations say, but why they exist and how to communicate that reasoning in language businesses understand.

Her advice to young professionals is simple: study the history of regulations, not just the text. The context behind a rule is often more valuable than the rule itself.

Permission to be imperfect

One line from Kamayani Nagar, Head of Retail Sales at Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC, may be the most necessary of all six conversations.

“We need to get it out of our heads that we are expected to be superwomen. It’s a myth.”

Nagar brings 23 years of financial services experience, a gold medal from IIM Indore and a background in journalism. Her point is not about lowering standards. It is about honesty with oneself.

Sometimes, personal life will demand more attention. Sometimes professional life will. Choosing one over the other at different points is not failure. It is how people sustain long careers.

Investing in every PIN code

Madhu Lunawat, MD and CEO of The Wealth Company Mutual Fund, entered fund management through private equity and stressed assets, a space where the quality of the person running a business often matters more than the numbers themselves.That experience shaped her investment philosophy.

“I always look at the promoter, not just the hard metrics but the softer aspects too,” she says. “That is often where the real alpha is hidden.”

After years of managing wealth for family offices and institutions, she wanted to expand that opportunity across the country. That ambition led to MF Didi, an initiative that trains women at the grassroots level to become mutual fund distributors, offering them a career that is flexible, independent and entirely their own.

The competition she almost skipped

Cheenu Gupta, Senior VP – Fund Management (Equities) at HSBC Mutual Fund, had already secured a placement at a leading private bank after her MBA when she heard about a mutual fund competition offering a prize of Rs 1 lakh.

She stayed back two days in an empty hostel to prepare, won the competition, and unexpectedly walked away with a job offer that changed her career.

“When you take a calculated risk, it may not pay off in the near term,” she says. “But over the long term, it does pay off meaningfully.”

Two decades of portfolio management later, that belief still guides her decisions. So does another principle.

“Conviction does not mean rigidity. If the drivers of an investment thesis are no longer intact, the fund manager must go back to the drawing board and take a call.”

The joy of building something

Komal Narang, Chief Client Officer at Jio BlackRock Asset Management Company, left the scale of a large institution to join a startup backed by two global giants. For her, the answer is simple.

“It is the joy of creating,” she says. “Very rarely in life do you get a chance to build something from the ground up.” That instinct for clarity also shapes her view of the industry.

“A customer is looking for something simple that builds credibility and trust,” she says. “The moment we started simplifying the message and speaking in a language that is not jargon-laden, scale became inevitable.”

On women in finance, she is equally direct. “This is a highly meritocratic industry. After a point, gender becomes irrelevant. Your skill sets, how you are building a business, they take over.”

Six women. Six different paths. One common thread: careers worth having are rarely built on being extraordinary every day. They are built by showing up consistently, holding your ground when needed, and trusting that honest work eventually speaks for itself.

Also read:  The money conversation that never happened