Building Qonfido: From Shared Frustration to Purpose

It began 22 years ago in a small apartment within XLRI, Jamshedpur.

Nine of us were temporarily housed in staff quarters while the hostel was still being completed. Amongst these were the two of us. We were just two guys, fresh out of engineering college, figuring out if management was our calling. We hit it off easily, unaware that two decades later, we would come back together, this time to build something of our own.

Today, we’re building Qonfido.

And this is why.

Two Careers, One Underlying Restlessness

After business school, I joined HSBC and spent the next 20 years doing what ambitious finance professionals do. I worked across corporate banking, treasury sales, and eventually asset-liability management, handling multi-billion-dollar investments and being responsible for the bank’s liquidity.

For a while, it was fulfilling. The responsibility. The markets. The scale.

But beneath it all, something felt incomplete.

Vasant took a different path but landed in similar terrain. He began as a consultant at Accenture, advising global enterprises on digital transformation. Later, he spent nearly a decade at Citi, working across India and the UK, leading emerging technology and innovation programs at a global scale.

We would meet at reunions, exchange stories, compare notes on careers and life.

And eventually, the same realisation surfaced.

No matter how senior you become in a large institution, you are still part of a machine. Important, yes—but still just a cog in the wheel. The desire to build something enduring, something that wouldn’t be handed over when you moved on, never really went away.

The Moment of Clarity

In mid-2024, after Vasant returned from London, we spoke at length. Nothing was “wrong” with our careers, but everything felt temporary.

“There’s something bigger for us to build out there” he said.

Somehow, I knew exactly what he meant.

During that conversation, another truth emerged. Despite being finance MBAs and bankers with nearly two decades of experience, we struggled to manage our own personal finances holistically. The best tools we could find involved elaborate spreadsheets, manual tracking, and fragmented advice.

Surely, we thought, there must be enterprise-grade tools for individuals.

There weren’t.

In fact, there wasn’t even a single platform that brought all personal financial data together meaningfully.

That was the real wake-up call.

The Real Problem Isn’t Money

India’s wealth is growing rapidly.

Household wealth grew over 14% in 2024.

Financial assets per capita rose by more than 15%.

Securities jumped nearly 30%.

Yet anxiety around money is rising, not falling.

Why?

Because access to products has been democratised—but quality, unbiased, contextual advice hasn’t.

People with wealth often feel just as anxious, if not more, about money. Many delay decisions due to low confidence or poor past experiences. Others rely on fin-influencers, social media, or WhatsApp forwards instead of data and context.

According to behavioural finance research, over 60% of retail investors admit their decisions were influenced by social media.

The issue isn’t lack of options.

It’s fragmentation, confusion, and absence of holistic guidance.

Even at the top end, the math doesn’t work. India has roughly 8.5 lakh HNIs and about 1,500 private wealth managers. That’s one advisor for every 500+ individuals— and that’s just for the wealthy.

We saw this dysfunction from the inside.

Successful professionals and entrepreneurs couldn’t answer basic questions:

• Is my money aligned with what I want from life?
• Do I understand what I’m invested in?
• Is this advice truly right for me, or just convenient for someone else?

Wealth was being created—but not thoughtfully managed.

And there’s a big difference.

Why Qonfido Needs to Exist

The real gap is personalisation at scale.

Traditional wealth management works for the ultra-rich. Everyone else either navigates conflicts of interest or goes it alone.

There is no middle layer that understands an individual’s full financial life, goals, risks, and context—and then helps them build wealth that lasts.

We believe technology can solve this. But not as another trading app or a portfolio tracker.

Qonfido is built as an intelligent companion for money—one that understands that money is a tool, not an identity.

How We’re Building Qonfido

We asked ourselves:

What if we had access to simple, personalised and trusted financial guidance anytime - on a Sunday night or while heading to the airport to catch a 7AM flight on Monday morning?

Our answer is a future-ready, AI companion for financial wellness, built around three simple layers:

1. One Intelligent View - All your financial data - connected and smartly organised into one clear picture - available 24x7, right in your palm.
2. Personal Insights: Turn data into understanding. Risks, gaps, progress, trade-offs. Tailored to your aspirations, habits and capacity to decide.
3. Trusted Actions: When action is needed, your companion steps in with unbiased guidance, grounded in your context, transparent logic and choices that we’d recommend to our own families.

Our obsession is simple:

Money management should feel like clarity instead of anxiety.

Who We’re Building For

Qonfido is for people who are ambitious, capable, and thoughtful, but tired of being treated like transactions.

Professionals. Entrepreneurs. Executives.

People like you who’ve built wealth and now want to architect it consciously.

We’re not building despite our experience.

We’re building because of it.

(If this sounds someone like you, and you would like to help us build, then please do sign up at Qonfido.)

The Real “Why”

The answer to a “why” is always the most revealing, because it bares open purpose.

People often ask why we walked away from comfortable corporate careers.

The answer is straightforward.

We want to spend the next 15 years building something that helps families like our own make better financial decisions - with confidence and calm. If we can democratise access to high-quality financial thinking, we’ll have built something to be proud of.

From Then to Now

Twenty-two years after that hostel room in Jamshedpur, we’re finally building what we once talked about, just not in the way we imagined.

Is it scary? Absolutely.

We walked away from stability to build something that might fail. But we’re convinced the real measure of success isn’t valuation, it’s the impact.

If Qonfido can change how millions of Indians relate to money, the risk will have been worth it and we’d be proud of what we built.

If you are with me till here and resonate with the above, then why don’t you help us build Qonfido. We are opening up an early access for believers and tinkerers. Please sign up for an early access.