Sharma is used to being the odd one out, the basketball player-cum-engineer-turned-CFO of buy now, pay later platform ZestMoney reckons. And she's using it as her strength
You just can’t afford to be penny wise and pound foolish: CFO, COO and co-founder, ZestMoney
Priya Sharma starts the conversation with an odd but right on-the-money insight. The easiest thing to do in the business of credit, reckons the first-time entrepreneur, is to clock growth. Hard to believe? “It’s simple. Keep lending. There is no dearth of demand,” smiles the chief financial officer (CFO) of ZestMoney, a ‘buy now, pay later’ (BNPL) platform. Though there can be a flurry of best-ever months, soon you might be sitting on a huge heap of losses. Scale is easy, business is tough.
For the 42-year-old investment banker, another tough ask is to make sense of valuation ‘insanity’. A bunch of Johnny-come-lately in the BNPL and fintech space have not only raised loads of money at heady valuations and galloped into the unicorn stable, but biggies like Amazon too are flirting with the credit play. Looks quite odd. Right?
The grad from London Business School, though, is not bothered by the loud noise. “Valuations are a bit overblown,” says Sharma, who started her career as a management and technology consultant with Sapient Corporation in 2001. With some corrections happening in the public markets, she lets on, it would be odd if private markets don’t follow suit.
There are a couple of more ‘odd’ elements in Sharma’s CV. Take, for instance, her educational background and professional role. Sharma has done her BTech in metallurgical engineering from IIT-Varanasi. Second, the CFO is not a chartered accountant. And lastly, she wears multiple hats at ZestMoney. “I am CFO, COO [chief operating officer] and co-founder,” beams Sharma, who is used to being the odd one out since her school days. A good part of her early education happened in schools where she was one of the few girls. Reason: Her dad worked as principal of the residential boys’ school, and Sharma happened to be one of the students. “It’s a difficult time for a girl, especially when she is growing up,” says Sharma, who kept on encountering challenges.
At times, challenges were of her own making. Take, for instance, her move to get into IIT. She never wanted to become an engineer. Coming from a family where, except her parents, most of the members were doctors meant little choice for the young girl. Her parents didn’t want her to pursue medicine and destiny took her to IIT-Kanpur. As a basketball player, Sharma used to visit the IIT campus and represented her school. Though she used to perform exceptionally well, the champion now wanted to score a maximum by cracking one of the toughest entrance examinations in India. “It was more about getting into IIT and less about becoming an engineer,” she says.
(This story appears in the 25 February, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)