Jayshree Venkatesan

Background

Jayshree Venkatesan has extensive global expertise working with financial service providers in delivering financial services to low income and under-served households and businesses. She earned a Masters in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (2020), a Masters in Business Administration from MDI, Gurgaon (2005) and an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Mumbai University.

She is an independent director at Centrum Microfinance Private Ltd, an NBFC that enables access to finance to urban and peri-urban households and small business owners. She was awarded the Chevening Gurukul fellowship by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), UK to study social impact bonds at Kings College London in 2014. She was also a Young Fellow sponsored by the Council of United States and Italy as part of a cohort that thought about the future of work for the next decade. She was also a fellow at the Hindu Center for Politics and Public Policy in Chennai, and published a policy report on the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana- a program that offered bank accounts to every household in India.

Jayshree has authored several op-eds for the Hindu and Hindu Business Line, and curated a column published in the Hindu Business Line called ‘Finance matters’. Prior to joining Fletcher, she worked as an independent consultant with CGAP, a think tank housed within the World Bank, the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion, Cashless Catalyst (a USAID funded project on digital financial inclusion) and JICA. Prior to that, she was the chief executive officer and founding member of IFMR Mezzanine Finance (now a part of Dvara Trust), where she was involved in structuring the first Indian mezzanine fund that invested in microfinance institutions. Jayshree started her career in ICICI Bank in India.

Her current areas of interest/expertise are: