We could not have been happier to have Smita Aggarwal, Global Investment Advisor at Flourish Ventures, join us on the show. Smita is an investor that seeks new business models across South Asia and Southeast Asia in the FinTech innovation space, that drives value creation for all stakeholders.  

Flourish Ventures is a venture firm investing in entrepreneurs whose innovations help people achieve financial health and prosperity. As an evergreen fund, Flourish deploys patient capital with a long-term perspective. Flourish's team is growing the portfolio built within Omidyar Network over the last decade.

Some of the topics we discussed with Smita:

• Her early career in project finance for large corporates
• The excitement of being part of the new consumer banking innovations in India
• Setting up a rural lending business from scratch
• Working at the Reserve Bank of India and getting a peek into the policymaking process
• The hotbed of innovative business models in South and Southeast Asia
• The importance of financial inclusion
• Flourish Ventures
• Embedded finance
• The excitement and challenges of operating in frontier markets
• Taking learnings from one market and applying them to another
• So much more...

Other titles we considered for this episode:

1. I Am an Accidental VC
2. You Might Need to Get Into Many Adjacencies Yourself
3. There Are Some Building Blocks Essential for Every Country to Have
4. Huge Respect for Anyone Who’s an Entrepreneur
5. The World Around You Changed
6. They Pivoted, Adapted…Changed