Finance is the heart, not the brake — Akshay Sarma on the lender CFO

Akshay Sarma joined Axio — then Capital Float — straight out of Cambridge in 2015, eight years before this conversation. He had spent six years before that at Deutsche Bank across London, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Bombay, moving from trader's assistant to G-Sec trader to structured ABF in Southeast Asia. The trading floor taught him a multi-screen multitasking muscle most CFOs never develop. The first CFO job came eight years into the Axio arc, with no accounting background, because the founders had watched him navigate demonetisation, GST, IL&FS, and COVID and decided he understood liabilities as well as he understood the loan book.

The chair Akshay describes is the one most lender CFOs deliver poorly. Finance as a brake. The line he draws against that — finance as the heart of the body, pumping blood to every part — is the spine of the conversation. The mechanics behind the line are what make it operational: co-lending as the structural unlock for leverage discipline, retail granularity as the risk-profile choice, and a daily line to the head of risk that most CFOs treat as quarterly.

Heart, not brake#

The metaphor is rehearsed enough in finance circles to read as a slogan, but Akshay’s version has machinery underneath.

Finance cannot be a brake. If finance hit the brakes, everything just stops — and the car just cannot stop. What you need finance to do is act like the heart of a human body. You need to pump blood to every part of the body.

The brake-mode CFO is the one founders quietly route around. Akshay’s job at Axio runs the other way: structure the pricing, raise the liabilities, run the cost-base projects, sit alongside every HOD as the partner who explains why a need works or doesn’t. The role is closer to enabler than guardian. The discipline isn’t gentler — co-lending limits and ALM hygiene are non-negotiable — but the posture is. Finance pumping blood, not standing in the doorway, is the working frame.

Co-lending and the leverage equation#

The structural choice Axio made — building on co-lending rather than balance-sheet lending — is the part of the conversation a generalist might skim and miss.

Co-lending helps you maneuver this. The most important thing from a lender's perspective is that it helps you manage leverage. I am not borrowing money directly on my balance sheet — there is no liability on my balance sheet to make an EMI payment every month.

A young lender raising money at 14–15% has two problems compounding: high cost of funds and the risk-adjusted return math forcing the book into riskier products. Co-lending breaks the loop. The bank lends at 12% directly to the borrower; Axio underwrites and services; the leverage on Axio’s own balance sheet stays at 2–2.5x instead of the 4–5x balance-sheet lenders run. When COVID hit, Axio never defaulted on a payment because there were no EMIs to make — collections went up the chain as they came in. The choice looks like a pricing tactic; it’s actually a survival design.

Risk and finance sitting on top of each other#

The other structural piece is the relationship between two functions most companies separate.

In the lending business, the folks who head risk and the folks who head finance are people who have to work the closest. When things shake up on the risk side, they inadvertently shake up on the P&L.

Akshay and Amrita, Axio’s head of risk, talk every day. They have their fights in private. Co-lender policy changes that look like risk decisions ripple immediately into the liability structure Akshay raises against; risk policy a co-lender won’t accept doesn’t survive contact with the funding stack. The conventional org chart has risk reporting to the CRO and finance to the CFO as independent units — and they are independent. The working pattern is closer: two peers running a shared dashboard, disagreeing in private, presenting one decision outside. The retail-and-granular book that lets Axio survive shocks only works if this loop is daily, not quarterly.

Doers first, thinkers second#

The hiring frame is the cleanest distillation of how Akshay grew into the chair himself.

What you would ideally want from your team is for them to start off as doers — and then for themselves to graduate as folks who can extrapolate the doing to the thinking.

The thesis is mechanical. A team that has done the nuts and bolts — pulled the Excel sheet, run the ALM, fought through a rating-upgrade pack — knows where the leakages hide. A team that has only thought strategically misses the small things that compound. Akshay’s career is the proof: trader’s assistant to structuring to G-Sec to capital markets to liabilities to CFO, each step operationally hands-on before it became strategic. The corollary is that finance teams at young lenders should hire for operational competence first and trust the strategic muscle to develop on the job. The reverse — strategy hires who never touched the machinery — is the bad bet.

What to listen for#

The full episode runs the longer Hyderabad-to-Bombay-to-London-to-Bangalore arc, the Deutsche-Bank trading-floor years (six screens, alerts, the multitasking muscle), the Cambridge MBA pivot into alternative lending, and the long story of Axio’s product evolution from a micro-debt syndication marketplace into checkout finance and personal credit. Akshay’s three-word descriptor is Aggressive. Thoughtful Doer. Funny. Listen at /podcast/ep-014-akshay-sarma; for the longer conversation across the catalogue, see /topics/modern-finance-function or /topics/capital-allocation.