As told to Ira Swasti
In the three decades he worked for CitiGroup and Bank Muscat, Samit Ghosh picked up every nuance of the banking business. That experience along with his family background (of being born in a middle-class family where he saw his parents’ fortune change with the 1985 revolution in the financial services industry) made Ghosh want to move to his next professional challenge, of making financial services available to the working poor by providing them loans. He founded Ujjivan Financial Services, a microfinance venture, in 2005, and in the past seven years, it has disbursed more than $580 million among a million customers. Interestingly, Ujjivan has also won the Great Place to Work award three times. Ghosh’s secrets to making that happen are simple— don’t work after office hours and ask employees to go home on time.
