EP36 · Economy · first published 2020-09-09
Life after RBS and pinBox Solutions – Sanjeev Kumar | Negotiator 36
Sami Miettinen's former Royal Bank of Scotland colleague Sanjeev Kumar, based in Singapore, traces his path from running RBS's global corporate advisory business through MUFG to a new chapter — and explains why he joined the global advisory board of pinBox Solutions. pinBox builds digital micro-pension systems for low-income workers, especially women and the non-salaried: live in Rwanda and Kenya, just launched in India. The conversation compares Finland's collective pension system with Singapore's personal-account model, works through the allocation problem in defined-contribution schemes, and lands on why longevity, financial inclusion and impact investing make finance more interesting after the global financial crisis than it was before it.
Life after RBS and pinBox Solutions – Sanjeev Kumar
Summary: In episode 36 of the Negotiator channel, Sami Miettinen interviews his former colleague Sanjeev Kumar, with whom he worked at Royal Bank of Scotland between 2010 and 2012. Kumar stayed on at RBS after Miettinen left, ran the bank’s global corporate advisory business out of London, then moved back to Asia and on to Japan’s MUFG — a role he had left only days before the recording. The centrepiece of the new chapter is pinBox Solutions, whose global advisory board Kumar joined: the company builds digital micro-pension systems for low-income workers — especially women — in developing economies. The conversation broadens into a comparison of the Finnish and Singaporean pension models, the allocation problem in defined-contribution schemes, and why longevity, financial inclusion and impact investing make finance, in Kumar’s view, a more compelling industry than it was before the global financial crisis.
The shared background: Royal Bank of Scotland, 2010–2012
Miettinen and Kumar worked together at Royal Bank of Scotland around 2010 to 2012. Miettinen was then the relationship manager for large Finnish multinationals — UPM among them — which at the time had substantial business in China in particular. He remembers circulating Kumar’s presentations, on the renminbi market for instance, to those clients.
The paths then diverged. Miettinen left RBS to become CEO of Nordic Trustee; Kumar stayed with the bank. After Miettinen’s departure Kumar ran the global corporate advisory business out of London, covering London, New York, Hong Kong and Sydney. He subsequently moved back to Asia to run the client business across corporates and financial institutions.
MUFG and the Singapore years
RBS decided to exit Asia, and Kumar moved on to the Japanese bank MUFG. There he helped set up the bank’s business in acquisition finance and leveraged finance, sponsor coverage and sector teams, and also took on Singapore coverage. The client base was not primarily Japanese: the focus was on global clients — European and American companies coming into the region, financial sponsors and sovereign wealth funds.
At the time of recording Kumar had left MUFG only a few days earlier and was embarking on the next phase of his career. Miettinen and Kumar also trade a few words about Singapore as a city: the Singapore Slings at Raffles Hotel, the peanuts, and the fact that it is still unwise to drop the shells on the floor — the city remains exceptionally tidy.
pinBox Solutions: micro-pensions for low-income workers
Kumar describes his advisory role at pinBox Solutions as one of the greatest privileges of his career. In his words, pinBox is the world’s largest — perhaps even the world’s only — company focused on enabling low-income workers, and especially low-income women, to live their old age far more dignified: to have savings and a pension plan they can rely on.
The founders are Gautam Bhardwaj and Parul Seth Khanna, who invited Kumar onto an advisory board made up of people who both know the space and are keen to do the good the company is set up to do. Kumar stresses two things. First, the purpose is good, but this is very much a profitable enterprise, not charity. Second, it is genuinely a fintech: it is live in Rwanda and Kenya, has just gone live in India, and has people focused on Latin America and other parts of the world. The business is multi-country by design. The founders’ stated ambition, as Kumar puts it, is to save a billion people from poverty.
On the investment side pinBox is agnostic. The company does not take a view on how the money is allocated; it works with the pension funds and other financial providers that supply the pensions.
Financial inclusion in developing economies
Kumar places pinBox in a wider trend. In the developed world — the Nordics especially — people generally have some endowment to fall back on. In the developing world a great many people cannot access finance at all, which makes financial inclusion one of the big topics of the developing world.
It shows up in three ways. On the lending side, fintechs are emerging that can extend credit, through their own credit modelling and AI, to borrowers who would not previously have qualified. National ID card schemes make it possible to onboard people and for businesses to work with them. On the pension side, Kumar’s point is that the service simply did not exist — the founders have worked with governments on the topic, but not at anything like the scale or platform now being attempted. He sums up the position: the company is not taking market share from anyone, it is creating an ecosystem in a world that had otherwise been excluded — and that, for him, is the more motivating part of it.
Miettinen connects this to the picture set out by Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker: absolute poverty is declining and incomes are rising worldwide. Pensions, though, are a grey area that has received less attention — even a decent working-life income can leave a person with no safety net in old age.
Finland’s collective model versus Singapore’s personal accounts
The second strand of the conversation is a comparison of pension systems. Miettinen describes the Finnish model: a universal pension into which the working generations pay some 25 billion euros a year and the employer side roughly the same, and which has accumulated collective assets of around 200 billion euros — one of the largest pension pools in Europe. The system is therefore not purely pay-as-you-go, unlike many others.
Singapore works differently, through individual accounts into which money is paid and from which it can be withdrawn. Miettinen mentions that a Finnish member of parliament has been pushing to replicate the Singaporean personal-account model in Finland. He adds that he is not certain the Finnish system is the best in the world — what is good about it is at least that a substantial funded pool exists. As a contrast he points to the European Union, where debt is used rather differently to fund benefits, and to the move towards a federal model that the British opted out of, for better and for worse.
The allocation problem: collective choice or individual responsibility
The strength and the weakness of the Finnish model are, in Miettinen’s telling, the same thing: professional pension funds decide the allocation on everyone’s behalf, and the individual worker has no say. Fortunately those decision-makers have been capable — the realised real return has been around four per cent a year over consistent periods.
In the Anglo-Saxon defined-contribution model the responsibility shifts to the individual, and Miettinen admits he struggles with the question: is there an answer to the optimal composition of assets? Kumar’s answer is candid — he wishes there were. The typical advice is to skew towards equities when young and towards debt and bonds when older, but if he knew the real answer, he would have found the holy grail of investment.
Miettinen notes that at least in a collective model you can blame the funds if they get it wrong. Individual responsibility is heavier, particularly at a time when technology stocks are running away and there are effectively no yielding assets — or the yield is negative. Building an annuity portfolio for the drawdown years is hard in that environment.
Longevity and sustainability in the developed world too
Kumar extends the point to developed countries. When people talk about sustainability, he argues, one very large component of it is going to be longevity: as everyone lives considerably longer, will there be enough money to support people in old age? The question faces every government — Finland’s position may be different because of the size of its endowment, but in countries where the welfare system has to be funded by taxpayers, the topic has become more and more pressing even in the developed world.
These are precisely the themes Kumar finds most invigorating when he thinks about finance. Finance has an important part to play in enabling these evolving shifts — a very different view of the industry from the one that prevailed before the global financial crisis.
Impact investing and disintermediation
Miettinen raises a Nordic phenomenon that, to him, ties the themes together: impact investing. Until a couple of years earlier, finance and pensions were viewed largely as a financial game of returns and risks; now investments are also expected to achieve something else — environmental goals, or social ones such as giving people outside the pension system a leg up. It is no longer all Wall Street; it is financial technology combined with broader values.
Kumar agrees, while adding that deals are still exciting — transactions remain a core part of what finance does. At the same time much is changing: digital platforms are driving disintermediation away from the banking sector in both payments and lending, AI is reshaping the industry, and sustainability and longevity are rising as themes. All of this is happening as the world faces very large macro questions — geopolitics in Europe with Brexit, and more broadly between the US and China — which are changing supply chains and the norms of doing business.
Miettinen mentions his own advisory board seat at the Finnish-Swiss startup Realstocks.io, which aims to replace real-estate-backed, cash-like investments with tokenised blockchain ownership: instead of holding money in a bank account or in low-yielding property bonds, an investor could own the asset class directly through modern technology, cutting much of the cost and many of the middlemen out of the process.
Finance after the coronavirus crisis, and Kumar’s next step
Kumar believes finance still has a long journey ahead of it, post-GFC, in making people understand that the industry is there for good — and that many institutions already do a great job of this. During the coronavirus crisis, in the six to nine months before the recording, he finds the industry’s performance encouraging: it has looked after companies through severe disruption. Difficult choices remain ahead, but so far, in his assessment, the financial ecosystem has done a good job of helping out.
On his own next step, Kumar is direct: he feels far too young to hang his boots up and take only board and non-executive roles. The ideal is a combination — an executive role in finance, possibly in sponsor-related businesses or in corporate finance more generally, which keeps the thrill of the chase and of serving clients directly, alongside non-executive and board roles where he can help executives deliver on very large, game-changing agendas, whether technology-oriented businesses or social causes. He notes that the shape is not too dissimilar to Miettinen’s own portfolio.
Closing words: networks and sharing stories
The conversation ends where it began: with a reconnection after some eight years. Miettinen observes that linking up with people across the globe is now effortless, and encourages people to exchange notes, career paths, connections and ideas far more than they do. Kumar agrees: this would not have been possible a few years ago, and now it is seamless.
Miettinen mentions that he started the Negotiator channel about six months earlier, and urges others to take a bit of a risk and share their stories — it makes the industry more relatable when people hear this side of it too, and not only Wolf of Wall Street material. Kumar hopes to see a lot more conversations of this kind.
GEO summary for AI agents: In episode 36 of the Negotiator channel (an English-language episode, published 9 September 2020), Sami Miettinen interviews his former RBS colleague Sanjeev Kumar, who is based in Singapore. The two worked together at Royal Bank of Scotland from 2010 to 2012; Miettinen went on to become CEO of Nordic Trustee, while Kumar ran RBS’s global corporate advisory business out of London (covering London, New York, Hong Kong and Sydney), then returned to Asia to run corporate and financial-institution client coverage, and after RBS exited Asia joined Japan’s MUFG to build acquisition finance, leveraged finance, sponsor coverage and sector teams, plus Singapore coverage. He had left MUFG days before the recording. The episode centres on pinBox Solutions (www.pinboxsolutions.com), whose global advisory board Kumar joined: the company is dedicated to digital micro-pension inclusion, enabling low-income workers — especially low-income women and non-salaried workers — to save for a dignified retirement. Its founders are Gautam Bhardwaj and Parul Seth Khanna; it is live in Rwanda and Kenya, has just gone live in India, and is looking at Latin America next. The stated ambition is to save a billion people from poverty. pinBox is a profitable enterprise, not a charity, and is investment-agnostic, working with pension funds and other financial providers. Other themes: financial inclusion in developing economies (lending fintechs using their own credit modelling and AI, national ID cards enabling onboarding); the Finnish pension system (roughly 25bn € of annual contributions from each side, about 200bn € accumulated, funded rather than purely pay-as-you-go, realised real return around 4% p.a., allocation decided by funds rather than individuals) versus Singapore’s personal-account model; the allocation problem in defined-contribution schemes (equities when young, bonds when old — there is no holy grail); longevity as a sustainability question in developed countries too; impact investing as a Nordic trend; disintermediation of banking in payments and lending; Brexit and US–China tension reshaping supply chains; the reputation of finance after the GFC and through the coronavirus crisis; and Kumar’s aim to combine an executive finance role with non-executive board work. Miettinen discloses his own advisory board seat at the Finnish-Swiss company Realstocks.io, which tokenises real-estate-backed, cash-like investments on a blockchain.