Dr. Venkatesh Panchapagesan is an Associate Professor of Finance and is the Chairperson of N. S. Raghavan Centre of Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He also heads the Real Estate Research Initiative (IIMB-RERI) and was, until recently, India’s sole academic representative in the advisory committee for World Economic Forum’s Initiative on Real Estate.

Venky has more than 22 years of experience in academia and in global financial services industry. Prior to joining IIM-B in September 2011, he was with the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, where he was the global currency trading strategist and led efforts to revamp trading and research analytical infrastructure. He has also worked with Goldman Sachs Asset Management in New York between 2005 and 2008 overseeing trading research for their quantitative hedge funds. Venky was a Professor of Finance at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis (1998-2005) and has also been a Visiting Associate Professor of Finance at Stern School of Business at New York University. He has published extensively in top peer-reviewed academic and practitioner journals of the world and was invited to be the NASDAQ stock market’s visiting economist for 2002-03.

Since 2012, Venky has been leading the effort on creating India’s first scientific research initiative on India’s growing real estate sector through IIMB-RERI. In a relatively short span, the initiative has created several innovative content including India’s first home buyer sentiment survey as well as a crowd sourced market data portal to tackle opaqueness in the real estate market. In addition, IIMB- RERI has been leading in the effort to create data and academic research and is now involved actively in helping the Government and key stakeholders such as National Housing Bank and HUDCO on several data driven policy formation and assessments. Moreover, his research projects have won several grants (including from International Growth Centre that is affiliated with London School of Economics) and have been accepted in leading academic conferences.

Aside of real estate, Venky is also actively interested in the design and regulation of financial markets, performance of financial intermediaries such as mutual funds and the history of the Indian stock market. His work on algorithmic trading and Indian business group owned mutual funds have won competitive research grants while his work on the US Bankruptcy process has won the Best Paper award in a leading academic conference. He is currently working on a primer on the Indian financial markets from an academic perspective as well as on creating an index of Indian stock market performance (prices, dividend yield and equity premium) going back to the 1800s.

Venky currently sits on the Board of National Stock Exchange’s International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) and Brigade Enterprises, a large real estate developer. He is also in the Governing Council of Centre for Advanced Financial Research and Learning (CAFRAL), an independent research body set up by the RBI. Also, until recently, he was on several Board Oversight Committees at the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and Indian Clearing Corporation Ltd (ICCL). He has been cited in leading global financial media such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times as well as leading Indian media outlets such as the Mint, Economic Times, Business Standard, Financial Express and the Hindu Business Line.

Venky is certified in India as a Chartered Accountant (Silver Medalist, All India 2nd Rank) and a Cost Accountant (All India 5th Rank), and holds a PGDM from IIM (Calcutta) where he was also the batch’s Silver Medalist. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Commerce from R.K.M. Vivekananda College (Chennai).