CA to the C-Suite: Three Divergent Paths
Podcast · Season 1, Episode 1 · 53 min
Your degree does not decide your destiny, but your decisions do. Three people qualify as chartered accountants and set out from the same starting line. Twenty five years later one is a chief financial officer, one has led a global bank’s India operations and now backs startups, and one built a company of his own. Host Madhu Soman asks what actually separated the routes, and how early each of them knew.
Key Takeaways
- None of the three chose the path deliberately at first. Sandeep Batra calls himself “the accidental CA”: his school assigned electives by maths score, and a low one left accounting as his only option at fourteen.
- Clarity arrived at different ages. Raghav Rao knew at twenty one that he would never practise and was heading for the corporate world. S. P. Balasubramanian wanted engineering, and describes the qualification as easy to get into and very difficult to get out of.
- Staying is not the same as standing still. Batra spent twenty one years at one company but changed role every two to three years, and roughly eight of those years were spent entirely outside finance.
- Most ethical failures are not villainy. Rao separates intentional breaches from unintentional ones, and argues the majority come from founders who never built the finance, legal and HR foundation underneath a good idea.
- The generational split is real, and the panel does not agree on it. Two argue education first and the career will follow. Rao disagrees outright: an eighteen year old today will do what they like, and whether it becomes a career is a later question.
The Guests
Sandeep Batra is Chief Financial Officer at Pidilite Industries, home to Fevicol. He spent twenty one years at ICI, took on roles well outside finance including running a commercial explosives joint venture, and later served as CFO through a private equity carve-out where the brief was explicitly to unlock value for shareholders.
Raghav Rao is the former Chief Operating Officer of Deutsche Bank India, and now invests as a venture capitalist. He began at a mid-nineties startup where nobody guided him, which he describes as his biggest learning, then built a career across HSBC, Fidelity, Lazard and Deutsche Bank.
S. P. Balasubramanian is promoter, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Carclub, India’s leading fleet car and mobility business, now operating in more than a hundred cities. He moved from Hertz and Europcar to found the company roughly eight years into his career, and the same foreign investor has stayed with him for nineteen years.
In This Episode
- Why each of them qualified, and how much of it was chosen rather than fallen into
- What success meant at twenty five, and what it means twenty five years later
- Staying two decades in one company without doing the same job twice
- Leaving a salaried career to start something, and the support system that made it survivable
- How each of them handles comparison with peers, and why their answers differ so sharply
- Keeping a company’s ethics intact when the pressure is on the numbers
- What AI changes for accounting and finance, and what it does not
- Advice for eighteen year olds, and what parents should stop doing
On handling comparison, the three answers could not be further apart. Batra: “You will never get less than what you deserve.” Rao, from investment banking: “You don’t need to run from the tiger. You have to just run faster than the other guy.” Balasubramanian simply measures against his own strengths rather than anyone else’s numbers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does qualifying as a chartered accountant lock you into accounting?
The episode is a sustained argument that it does not. The same qualification carried one guest to a CFO’s chair, one into banking leadership and venture investing, and one into founding a mobility business. Batra spent roughly eight of his twenty one years at ICI in roles that were not finance at all.
How early do you need to know what you want?
Later than most people fear. One guest was assigned his subject at fourteen by a maths score, another was clear at twenty one, and the third wanted engineering and changed course. What they share is not early certainty but a willingness to keep taking new ground once they had started.
When is the right time to start a business?
Balasubramanian left roughly eight years in, having built both the sector knowledge and the client relationships that followed him out. He is candid that it took a year and a half of planning, months without drawing an income, and a family that carried the risk with him.
What should parents do differently?
Rao’s answer is direct: stop micromanaging. Set clear guardrails, be explicit about the few values that are not open for compromise, and leave the rest to them.
Your Host
Madhu Soman is a global media executive and a member of the Board of Advisors at Crestoria Global, with a career spanning Reuters and Bloomberg. Hosting rotates across our advisory board, so each episode is led by someone with direct experience of the ground it covers.
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