Why the rising success of women founders means the BFSI sector needs to further customize financial products
RizingHer – an entrepreneurial information network that empowers and arms women leaders with knowledge, insights, mentorship and guidance – curated The Equality Summit 2025 in Delhi on 7th March 2025, which was the eve of International Women’s Day. The event was in partnership with India’s leading law firm Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas & supported by DSP Mutual Fund and IDFC First Bank.
This is the second equality-focused event curated by RizingHer following The Rizing Equality Summit 2024 last February in Mumbai. RizingHer will soldier on with these equality-focused initiatives to take women entrepreneurs to the next level. A time like this is relevant, considering that as of 2024, close to 20 out of nearly 110 Indian unicorns are co-founded and led by women, with the D2C space seeming to emerge as a haven for women entrepreneurs. And India is said to have more than 7000 active startups with at least 1 female founder, accounting for 7.5% of the country’s startup ecosystem, as of 2025. This is particularly relevant for the BFSI sector in terms of tangible opportunities and imperatives. With more and more women founders thriving and making their mark on the global startup ecosystem, their ventures would require a bit more customized financial products with evolved credit assessments and risk models. Accordingly, policies could be better designed to address the challenges that women entrepreneurs might uniquely face. The forum gathered a mix of women leaders, aspiring and established women entrepreneurs, investors and other stakeholders to explore successful women founders from a position of strength & lay out their trials and tribulations, how to upskill through AI and Blockchain, embarking on financial freedom, how to employ mindfulness, engaging with venture debt and more. The keynote speech – given by Rahul Bhasin, Founder & Managing Partner of Baring Private Equity Partners India – powerfully touched on buoying female leadership, being taken more seriously, competing in a world that’s much more tech-led than before and more. The event had a stellar investor panel featuring Ritika Rathi of Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, Nidhi Khurana of SIDBI Venture Capital Fund of Funds, Riya Singh of Soonicorn Ventures and Vanshika Bagrecha of RPSG Capital. The Equality Summit 2025, also, featured sessions, such as a masterclass by DSP Mutual Fund to foster more financial freedom for women founders, a venture debt session by Rahul Gupta of ValuAble, as well as sessions, like mindfulness, AI, Blockchain and more. Vandana Shroff, Partner – Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, emphasizes, “At CAM, we’ve endeavoured to guide multiple women-led ventures in India and it never ceases to amaze us how resilient and innovative these women entrepreneurs can be. If we actively work on plugging the gaps, such as fostering better access to capital, well-intentioned mentorship and conducive corporate governance structures, there’s no telling what India could look like 10 years down the line”. Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas (CAM) is India’s leading law firm that advises a large and diverse set of clients, including domestic and foreign commercial enterprises, financial institutions, PE and VC funds, startups & government and regulatory bodies. CAM has offices in key business centres in Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chennai, GIFT City, Singapore and Abu Dhabi. Shrija Agrawal, Founder – RizingTV, remarks, “I’m fairly confident that the next set of wealth creators are going to be women from India and Asia. Slowly and steadily, women in Asia have been increasing their combined wealth by $2 trillion every year since 2019 & I think that’s going to continue to happen where women leaders, entrepreneurs and investors will change the startup ecosystem as we know it. This is the new standard for meaningful wealth creation”. RizingTV – which RizingHer is a property of – is a new-age and inclusive entrepreneurial information network that aims to be the true mirror reflecting Indian business, finance and technology in the expanse of not just Asia, but also, the global stage. Crafted for the intellectually curious, it explores the tenets that could help India become a $5 trillion economy: gender, capital, innovation, technology, ESG, sustainability, policy and more. DSP Mutual Fund has spent more than 30 years helping salaried people, rich individuals, NRIs, SMEs, foreign institutional investors and other parties grow their wealth and help them invest better.