The Vision Board Interview | Mr. Avishek Banerjee| Founder | UPCIDE

Mr. Avishek Banerjee

Founder, UPCIDE

Avishek is a Consulting professional with 18+ years of experience; primarily across Big 4’s, including EY, KPMG and PwC; focussed on Real Assets (real estate, transportation and tourism infra assets), Hospitality and Construction sectors, worked across India, ASEAN and MENA.

He is a Passionate market builder, transformation enabler( digital, operating model, supply chain and organisational); strategic adviser to CxO’s and Promoter Entrepreneur’s; creative thinker and learning to be “more”

Excerpts From The Vision Board Interview With Mr. Avishek Banerjee

Story Of Upcide?

I have worked three out of the four Big 4’s, i did not have the honor of completing all the 4 Dham, 4 dham yatra  for me has been short of one but beside that yes it’s been 16 plus years that i’ve worked on  & some years before that so we’re all about 19 years going now. So i’m one of those guys who started up after the age of 40. And it’s actually a Wealth-tech, within Fintech it have various sub sectors, so you have insurance you have payments brokerages & this is about wealth management and what we are trying to build is a platform which enables small investors to invest in large ticket physical asset and the primary reason to invest in physical asset is either to get rental periodic income or to get rental plus capital appreciation. It generally happens with real estate-backed assets, where you get to get terminal valuation gain as well as rental income. So that’s what we’re trying to build. We started off in august 2021, we’re six months old, we’re just learning how to walk. I take another energy from the kids and it’s been a fantastic journey so far & i think we’ll talk more about it as we go along.

Your Biggest Lesson Learnt While Working in the Big 4's?

So, as i said earlier i’ve worked in three out of the 4’s. For an outsider, it looks like a fairly complex thing but honestly, it’s actually a lot of people keep rotating. So you see a lot of similar faces even if you remove large organizations, sometimes you also see the familiar faces even if you’re working abroad in different offices. Actualy what i take away from this is that each of these organizations, actually all of them in some way have survived way more than some of their clients have. If you look at history i think all the Big 4’s were started somewhere in the early eighteen 1800s to 1845 – 1850. So anything between hundred ,two hundred seventy,  hundred eighty years have all survived in some form or other. So resilience and the ability to actually adopt and transform with the times, it is a fantastic thing that people can learn if they’re working in organisation like that. The resilience to grow, resilience to survive economies and geographies which have been hard, go through wars, go through famines, go through civil unrest and still be able to create alliances partnerships, do mergers, reverse mergers, organically grow and sustain and their revenues have never gone down. I mean between the 4’s, i would suspect they are close to 150-200 billion dollars of revenue. That’s a significantly massive from a four simple business enterprises. So that’s my first learning, resilience by alliance, by  actually being open to change, that’s at our enterprise level is a great learnin. That’s a great learning for the people down as well because the whole culture is that we have survived and we will survive and we will build on. So that mentality is really important that i believe is something that anybody who works will actually feel it and those who have worked outside probably need to know about. These are all organizations which are multicultural,they are fairly a whole bunch of people across all kinds of pedagogy and critically that are working the organizations, who are hiring a military strategist for their cyber security, who have hired olympians in the human capital advisory to actually give training and talent management. They’re open to imbibing knowledge and change from everywhere. They’re like sponge that is kind of taking people in and learning from them and actually going on. And finally it’s the people, it’s not necessarily that they will hire the best in class from best colleges. One filter that they have and it’s imbued in the way talent is sourced and it is evaluated is resilience. I think it’s embedded in, i won’t say it’s documented anywhere but every time i was sitting in an interview or my seniors were interviewing a senior resource or a junior resource the idea was not what you did in a college or what you did in a school. The idea was that how often did you fail and how much you come back and try to win again and that’s very important because an organization like a big 4’s is a very high pressure, high growth organization. You need to be resilient you need to be able to actually deliver under pressure at all times. So i think those are the three four things that i take away from my 16+ years journey.

The Vision Board Interview | Mr. Avishek Banerjee| Founder | UPCIDE

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