Tejal Gandhi

In 2002, after thirteen years at Standard Chartered Bank — where she was part of the six-member Indian team sent to Hong Kong for the Y2K project — Tejal Gandhi decided to do something unusual. She walked away from a safe corporate salary and started Money Matters, a boutique financial planning and wealth management firm based in Mumbai. The early months were terrifying. Her pipeline was thin. She doubted herself. For a moment, she almost went back to the bank.

She didn’t. More than two decades later, Money Matters has grown into a trusted name in Indian financial planning, and Tejal has become a Certified Financial Planner with over thirty years of cumulative expertise. She is affiliated with the Financial Planning Standards Board of India (part of the U.S.-headquartered CFP program) and is one of the few Women Licensees in India authorised to practise Financial Life Planning under Money Quotient, one of the most respected names in the field globally.

Her firm has deliberately stayed boutique. Money Matters operates along two pillars: financial planning and wealth management for individual clients, and content development and skill-building programmes for everyone else. Tejal’s vision, as she puts it, is for her firm to become a household’s “financial doctor” — the first call when a client needs to make a money decision, whether about mutual funds, insurance, goal planning, retirement, NRI portfolios, or the slow, patient discipline of compounding.

Alongside her practice, she has become one of India’s quiet evangelists for women’s financial literacy. She has been featured as a finance expert on CNBC’s Indiwo, been honoured as the Most Consistent Individual Financial Advisor in 2009, and run countless workshops where young working women learn the basics of banking, investing, and financial self-defence. She was also the youngest and the only female president of the Rotary Club of Mumbai Queen’s Necklace, back in 1998–99 — a reminder that she has been quietly opening doors for other women long before it became fashionable. Her advice to anyone starting out, whether in finance or entrepreneurship, is disarmingly simple: “Have a dream and don’t stop dreaming; be determined and have a blueprint; don’t give up in the face of failures.”