About Me

A journey of extremes

My life has been a journey of extremes.

After having executed some industry pioneering work across many countries, I encountered some life altering events, during which I faced a lot pressures, including my wife passing on in unfortunate circumstances.

Also, in the years that followed many other close family members suffered from severe or terminal illnesses. This meant I had to get disassociated from active professional life. This led to some financial setbacks leading to health issues of my own.

However, through it all, I have been able to reach out and positively touch upon lives of others who were either low or were in pain; and I too was able to successfully overcome those dark periods of my own life.

Many, including myself, have wondered, as to how it was possible for an individual to live all by himself and smile through it all, and yet not feeling one’s own pain, be able to constantly reach out to others and spread love and happiness.

Having understood life from an alternate perspective, I have shared, as well as used those learnings to touch upon many human lives in a variety of different ways.

This website is my attempt to share some of these key life experiences, learnings and readings.

Hopefully these can prove to be inspirational to the readers and help in positively touching them in their daily lives.

26th April 2020

You can write to me from the Contact page.

Professional journey

Across three decades in leadership roles within global institutions, Paresh has already done, at scale, the whole of what Retinue offers its clients: setting strategy, taking businesses to market, growing them organically and through acquisition, running the large technology programs behind them, and holding the governance around it all. Retinue is a practice built on ground he has already covered.

Banking, finance and technology

Paresh spent his career at the front line of banking, financial services and technology, in global leadership roles at Capgemini, Oracle and Unisys. He has worked across virtually every major market, the USA, the UK and Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and ANZAC, serving some of the largest banks in the world, among them Citibank, HSBC, Barclays, Standard Chartered, Westpac and Bank of Ireland.

His domain runs deep and wide: global and transaction banking, payments and cards, retail and wealth management, channel integration and core banking. At Capgemini he built a global payments practice from the ground up, from zero to multi-million-dollar revenues, its strategy, its operating platform, and the senior talent that ran it; global banks turned to him repeatedly as their trusted authority in payments. At Oracle he scaled a nascent business into a multi-million-dollar global one. As Program Manager for Citibank's global payments transformation, he led the Global Funds Transfer product implementation and systems integration across Citigroup's Corporate and Investment Bank, handling cross-border and domestic payments in Europe, Asia and North America.

At Unisys AEME (Africa, Eurasia and Middle East), he owned the region's product strategy, directing the creation of a customised channel-integration platform, and shaped an integrated retail banking proposition bringing channel integration and core banking together.

Consulting and advisory

Those leadership roles are where the advisory expertise was gathered, not in theory, but by doing it. Paresh led strategy in its fullest sense, product, transformation and operations, and built businesses from the ground up while scaling nascent ones into global operations. Inorganic growth was part of that remit: identifying and evaluating acquisition targets, and conducting the due diligence to test whether a deal was worth pursuing. The governance that global leadership demands ran through all of it. He is known for executing end to end, business acumen matched by deep domain understanding, and the ability to lead, motivate and deliver amid the most challenging variables. These are the areas Retinue advises on today.

It is this experience that he now brings directly to mid-sized businesses and start-ups, helping them make and execute the decisions that decide whether they reach their next stage. A selection of his engagements, in institutions and at Retinue, is on the Clients page.

A signature engagement

He led one of the largest competitive bids of his career, a multi-million dollar fixed-price program to be delivered over eighteen months, winning it against the largest global integrators. He led the creation of the entire solution architecture, across the products of every vendor and the integration with all of the bank's systems, set out in a proposal of around a thousand pages. It was delivered on time and at a very high gross margin, and the outcome that mattered most: it made the client the first bank in the UK to comply with both Faster Payments and SEPA liquidity management.

Start-ups, investing and mentoring

Paresh is an active investor and mentor in the start-up ecosystem, and a Charter Member of TiE, drawn to founders creating genuine differentiation in areas that add value to human lives. His sector-agnostic portfolio spans companies including Agnikul, Chupps, CityData.AI and ExtraaEdge.

Alongside investing, he mentors founders and leaders through the hardest calls of building a company, the work that now sits at the centre of Retinue's advisory.

Coaching, mentoring and thought leadership

Across his career, colleagues and clients have known Paresh as much for his leadership and domain expertise as for coaching and mentoring, hand-picking, nurturing and growing senior talent, a patient ear, steady under pressure, and generous with guidance. He has also been a regular voice on industry platforms, presenting at banking and technology forums including those hosted by Microsoft, GITEX and the European Payments Authority. His conviction, and Retinue's, is simple: the value of experience is not in handing over answers, but in helping a leader reach their own clarity, and the confidence to act.

Career and credentials

Experience

• Managing Partner, Retinue Advisory (2022–present)
• Investor and mentor, start-up ecosystem (2017–present)
• Vice President and Global Head of Payments Practice, Capgemini
• Head of Payments Practice and Cards Product Strategy, Oracle (financial services)
• Program Manager, Citibank Global Payments Transformation
• Retail Banking Solutions Specialist and Project Manager, Unisys (Middle East)

Education and certifications

• Executive Program in General Management, MIT Sloan School of Management
• Bachelor's, Narsee Monjee College (ranked 27th, University of Mumbai)
• Accredited Corporate Director; Fellow, Institute of Directors
• Certification of Proficiency as an Independent Director
• Charter Member, TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs)
• Professional Certificates in FinTech and Blockchain, SP Jain
• Speaker at industry forums including Microsoft, GITEX and the European Payments Authority

Paresh leads Retinue's Business Advisory practice. To talk through a decision in front of you, get in touch.