Meet Soumya Rajan who quit Standard Chartered Bank job to start Waterfield Advisors

After rising through the ranks from a management trainee all the way to chief executive officer of a business at the age of 38 over a 15-year period, Soumya Rajan decided to chuck it up and pursue her entrepreneurial instincts by starting Waterfield Advisors, a boutique firm that advises India's family offices on succession planning and creating trusts.

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(She decided to pursue her…)

She had two compelling reasons to leave her job. One, her two immediate bosses quit. Shyam Srinivasan left to head Federal Bank and Peter Flavel moved to JPMorgan. Second, she got inspired by the success of Byron D Trott, a former vice chairman of investment banking at Goldman Sachs who started BDT Capital that later became known as the 'goto' I-bank for legendary investor Warren Buffet and many family offices in the west.

"It could have been a midlife crisis on what to do," says Rajan, 44, MD of Waterfield Advisors, who is also the sister-in-law of RBI governor Raghuram Rajan. While the decision rattled her parents, she got the unstinting support of husband Mukund Rajan, the Tata brand custodian.

"I wanted to do something different for the rest of my life." She named her venture after the road in Bandra, Mumbai, on which the ANZ Grindlays office where she began her career was located. She stayed with ANZ and later Standard Chartered Bank, which bought it, throughout her working career before setting up her own venture.

"I had run the length and breadth of the road to get new accounts as a management trainee in 1994," says Rajan, a mathematics graduate from St Stephen's College in Delhi. A year after she quit Standard Chartered in 2010, she partnered with Sanjay Teli, owner of executive search firm ESP Consultants, to look for staff.

She found many of them in her former bank and started the company in 2011 in a 400 sq ft office, which had once been occupied by her former employer. "Talent is critical, it can make or break an institution," says Rajan, who now employs 12 people and wants to double this by 2016. She relied on three factors to build her business — destiny, the goodwill of clients cultivated during her banking career and the rational, logical thinking of a mathematician. "I am a child of destiny," she says, referring to meeting husband Mukund atOxford with a scholarship in her great grandfather Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's honour, getting her ANZ job through a random application, her career advances and, now, her own venture.

Mukund, who encouraged her to take up assignments overseas, backed her to the hilt when she started building her own firm. "Earlier he used to frequently drop in for lunch in my office," says Rajan. "But now as part of the new team at Tata Sons, he hardly gets any time." Two years into the business, she has a client list of 30 Indian business families, of which 10 are in the Forbes 100 list. Unlike a bank, Waterfield doesn't have the pressure of selling products to these families. "Our business is pure advisory for our clients."

In India, family offices are set up by groups with wealth of more than $25 million (.`112 crore) while in the West this value is 10 times more. Last week, the Patnis came on board as stakeholders. After selling the IT company that bore their name to iGate in 2010, they were looking for just such an opportunity. Last October, Waterfield had sent them a client's proposal seeking funding from Nirvana, a PE fund owned by the Patnis.

"We were looking at establishing an independent platform for multi-family office space and wanted to back the right entrepreneur," says Amit Patni. He and brother Arihant Patni purchased a significant minority stake in Waterfield and will get a seat on the board. With this fresh infusion, Waterfield is now looking to get into other areas.

"We will now diversify into non-financial services, travel and wellness, leisure holidays, and family events for our clients," says Soumya, who wants her firm to also be a lifestyle manager for families. "I want to build a company that will live beyond me," she says. When she's not working, she has two hobbies that engage her. One, she's a western classical singer and, two, she's into interior designing. Other than that, she likes vacationing with her twin sister in London.

Source : Baiju Kalesh, ET Bureau; http://waterfieldadvisors.com