How Brought up in an unassuming family in an Odisha town, he proceeded to construct a Rs 60 crore income creating NBFC

Pravash Dash, 42, the founder and CEO of Arthan Finance, a non-banking financial company (NBFC), says that his company offers loans to micro and small businesses in Tier-2 and Tier-3 Indian cities and that they have impacted the lives of nearly 50,000 people spread across 28 states, 200 cities and 3000 pin-codes in the country in the last four years since they started operations. The Mumbai-headquartered Arthan Finance Private Limited generated revenue of Rs 60 crore during FY 2021-22 and cumulative revenue of Rs 200 crore as of date.

Pravash’s journey from Chourasi, a small village in Odisha, about 56 km from Bhubaneswar, where he was raised in a humble family and studied in Odia medium schools, to the position he has reached today is nothing short of a miracle. His parents were both government primary school teachers, and the family of four that included his younger brother struggled to make ends meet. The best thing in the midst of all the adversities we faced was that our parents divided their resources on our food and education.

They told us to focus on our studies and career, he says, looking back on his early life and reliving nostalgic memories with The Weekend Leader. He was hired by United Phosphorus Ltd, a chemical & fertilizer company in Mumbai as territory manager for SMEs at the campus placement in XIMB. After about a year, he switched to Axis Bank, Kolkata, where he joined as Deputy Manager and handled their SME loans in Odisha, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand.

From Axis, he joined IFMR Rural Finance headquartered in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, as a founding member, where he was given the responsibility to grow the business as COO in Odisha. In 2011, he joined RBL Bank in Mumbai as VP of Loans and worked there till 2016. He established the Rural Women's Loan Division and expanded banking operations among small businesses such as Kirana stores, pharmacies, small hotels, motels and dhabas, engineering works, and shoe stalls.

RBL was also the place where he met his two future business partners, Kunal Mehta and Gauri Shankar Rao. He left RBL to join YES Bank in Mumbai and set up their retail rural bank vertical. Pravash co-founded Arthan with Kunal. “My experience in the banking industry has helped me in Arthan,” he says. I have set up rural and small business verticals for emerging private banks.

At Arthan, we primarily work with people at the bottom of the pyramid, who face the biggest challenge in getting loans. “Coming from a rural background, I have noticed that the microfinance companies gave loans to the rural women, and the big banks gave loans to established businesses.” But the small businesses in rural areas did not have benefactors, and he decided to fill the gap with Arthan.

The company is flexible in terms of loan repayment options. Arthan, which started with him, Kunal, and two other employees, now has over 165 full-time employees. There are four core people in the company - Pravash, Kunal, Gauri, and Rupesh. But once they are trained, they leave us and move to big cities in search of better jobs, he says. Today, Arthan operates from a 3,500 sq ft office in Mumbai, which is their head office and where 45 people are working.

He got married to Yugantika Tripathi in 2009, and the couple has an 11-year-old daughter, Aaradhya. Yugantika works as HR Business Leader for Johnson & Johnson in Mumbai. We go on family vacations at least two to three times a year. He is inspired by Elon Musk, but attributes an incident in the family to starting Arthan.