Anju Patwardhan joined NUS in April 2020 as the Founding Director for the Centre for Productive Longevity. She is a globally experienced banker, venture investor, and board director. She has lived in Singapore, India, and San Francisco. In her last role, she was Managing Director at CreditEase Fintech Venture Capital Fund of USD 500 million. Based in San Francisco, she managed investments in over 40 companies globally (mainly in the US and the UK) since 2016. Several of these are now unicorns and are pioneers in financial services and in future of work.
She is an experienced board director and serves on boards of banks, fintech companies in California and London, and non-profit entities in Singapore. She is currently on boards of the Gulf International Bank in Saudi Arabia, the University of the Future Initiative in India, and on OCBC Bank’s Board Digital Advisory Council in Singapore. She has been a member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) steering committee on ‘Disruptive Innovation in Financial Services’ since 2015 and was also a member of WEF’s Global Council on Blockchain from 2016-18. She is a Distinguished Fellow of the Singapore Institute of Banking and Finance for Risk Management. She has served as FinTech Industry Expert at UC Berkeley (SCET) was previously on the advisory board of the Government of Estonia’s e-Residency program. Anju was a Fulbright Fellow & Visiting Scholar from ASEAN at Stanford University in 2016, and a Distinguished Careers Institute (DCI) Fellow at Stanford in 2017 and 2018. While at Stanford, she focused on the use of technology to support financial inclusion and financial well-being and she published reports on financial inclusion.
She also collaborated to launch a fintech course in 2017 at Stanford GSB for the MBA students and continues to be a guest speaker for the course. As a DCI Fellow, she got immersed in key pillars of the DCI program that are focused on the areas of longevity (the 100-year life), purpose, and community. Prior to this, Anju worked in banking for over two decades with Citibank and Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) in global and regional leadership roles, based in Singapore, including Chief Operating Officer, Chief Risk Officer, Digital Banking Head, and Global Chief Innovation Officer. She was a member of SCB’s global executive leadership team, member of its global Technology & Operations Management Group, and a member of the global Risk Management Group.
She is a globally recognized and awarded thought leader. She has spoken on fintech and financial inclusion at the World Economic Forum (WEF), G20 SME Finance Forum, Asian Development Bank, Milken Institute’s Global Conference, SF Federal Reserve Bank, London Business School, TiE Inflect, televised panel discussions in China and Singapore, and at other global events. She is an alumnus of the IIT Delhi and IIM Bangalore and has additional qualifications in board directorship, risk management, and art appreciation.