About Preeti Sinha
A Development Banker: Merging Finance with Purpose
Preeti Sinha is renowned in several fields as an development banker, strategist, speaker, published author, explorer, advisor and mentor. As a consultant she serves decision and change makers who have a positive view on our societies and on making capital do good. What Preeti brings to the table as her expertise is cross-disciplinary and multicultural thinking and execution-focused structuring for capital markets structures and impact investments, which are informed by her prior experiences of 30+ years as a banker, present-day thinking and analysis, personal experience of working across 4 continents.
Beyond her professional experiences, Preeti is a partner and athlete. Preeti has been a global nomad having lived and worked on 4 continents. She is a Swiss citizen. She lives in New Rochelle and has a strong sense of local community and friendships. She loves staying healthy and fit and having conversations about a kind, better and more equitable world.
Her professional accomplishments include a rich portfolio of capital for impact roles and structures that have improved lives in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and the USA. She has written and co-authored a series of articles and other practical solutions for “capital to serve humanity and planet and not the other way round.”
“If you can imagine it, you can create it. If you can dream it, you can become it.”
Personal Journey
From Ivy League Scholar to Global Development Banker
Arriving at Dartmouth College in 1989, as a 19 year old, I was going to be a Computer Science major. The Liberal Arts education at Dartmouth introduced me to my first course in Economics.
The opportunity to intern at JP Morgan and at the World Bank during Dartmouth, due to opportunities provided by Dartmouth alumni, transitioned me into a banker – first, an investment banker and then, a lifelong development banker.
After working for Lehman Brothers in Mergers & Acquisitions in Financial Institutions and Syndications on the trading floor for 2 years, I chose Yale School of Management as my Masters degree in Public and Private Management because of its emphasis on socially responsible management.
By the time I finished Lehman Brothers, I was on my pathway of ‘making capital do good.’ I believed, given the extreme poverty that I had witnessed in people living in urban slums and the street kids begging in traffic, that capital needed to do more than trade for arbitrage on the trading floor.
Career Highlights
30+ Years of Experience Across Global Institutions
After some wonderful experiences at JP Morgan at 60 Wall Street and the World Bank in Washington DC, I was a young Indian woman on Wall Street at Lehman Brothers. I first worked in the highly quantitative Mergers & Acquisitions team in the Financial Institutions Group. This was followed by an extremely dynamic time spent on the Lehman Trading Floor with the Syndications desk for Yankee Bonds.
Having determined at Lehman that I was going to spend my life making capital do good and following the Yale School of Management, I followed my passion to working in Emerging Markets and joined the start-up team setting up the India office of the Dutch Rabobank, a unique then AAA-rated private sector bank focused on Food & Agribusiness.
Therein started a career in Impact Capital that took me to the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland as the first cohort of Global Leadership Fellows with a motto ‘Committed to Improving the State of the World.’ After managing the Financing for Development (FFD) Initiative at the WEF and not having finished my thirst to work in multilateral development banks, I was invited to the African Development Bank (AfDB). I drove my two-seater convertible Toyota MR2 from Geneva to Tunis and experienced some of my most amazing days of my life at the mission-focused AfDB in the wonderful nation of Tunisia.
Destiny beckoned me back to India to create and launch an exciting Practicing Think-Tank at a private sector bank in New Delhi. Here, I became deeply involved in the global universe of impact investment funds in India and globally.
While being entrepreneurial and managing my firm Financing for Development Sarl in Geneva, I was headhunted for a role to lead the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) at the UN in New York. UNCDF financed loans and guarantees in the 46 least developed countries around the world.