The Capitalyst: You completed a degree in Commerce and a postgraduate degree in Mass Communication from Jamia Millia Islamia’s AJK MCRC, then began your journalism career in 2005 at India Today, moving through NewsX, Times Network and eventually CNBC-TV18. What was the specific moment when you realised that financial journalism was not a niche to tolerate but the most important story you could be telling?
Sumaira Abidi: Honestly, there was no single moment. And my entry into financial journalism wasn’t even particularly strategic. I was raised to never be afraid of change. In fact, I rather enjoyed it — so when the opportunity to move from general news to business news appeared, I said yes because the challenge appealed to me. Not because I had any great vision of where it would lead.
At CNBC, since everyone was already covering markets and stocks, I got pushed toward personal finance. At the time, it wasn’t considered the most prestigious beat. But I was happy to have found a niche, and I threw myself into it. Over the years, as I learnt and improved the show, something started to shift. I was meeting real investors and understanding what they feared, what they didn’t know, what no one had bothered to explain to them. And it hit me that what I was doing mattered in a very direct, unglamorous, important way.
Commerce was in my foundation. Communication was my training. Financial journalism turned out to be exactly where those two things were most needed together. One thing led to another and what had started as professional curiosity became something I felt genuinely responsible for. It stopped feeling like a niche and started feeling like the most important story I could be telling.
The Capitalyst: Your long-running show MF Corner at CNBC-TV18 became one of the most widely watched personal finance programmes in Indian television. Most financial television at the time was made for the market, not for the investor sitting at home. What was the gap you were responding to, and how did you decide what level of simplification was useful and what level was patronising?
Sumaira Abidi: The gap was hiding in plain sight. Most financial television at the time assumed the viewer already spoke the language of investing. The person sitting at home with Rs 5-10,000 and no framework for thinking about money was being handed content that was either too dense to follow or too vague to act on. Neither version was helping anyone.
My conviction, from the beginning, was simple: retail investors aren’t unintelligent. They’re uninformed. That’s a completely different problem. Unintelligent people need simpler content. Uninformed people need clearer content. The register I was aiming for was the same one a good teacher uses — you don’t lower the ceiling, you build the floor.
As for patronising… I had a test. If I were explaining something in a way that made the viewer feel small, I was doing it wrong. The goal was always to leave people feeling capable, not grateful. There’s a version of financial education that exists to make the expert look indispensable. That was the version I was actively trying to avoid.
The Capitalyst: Your book is built on a specific diagnosis: that Indian women have historically been encouraged to save but not to invest, and that saving alone is no longer enough to build genuine financial security. Where does that diagnosis come from — data, conversations with women, personal experience, or all three?
Sumaira Abidi: All three, but they arrived in a particular order. Personal experience came first. I grew up in a household where the women were educated, capable, earning… and yet somehow absent from the room when the big financial decisions were made. It wasn’t hostility. It was just habit.
Years of reporting confirmed it at scale. I spoke to many women across income levels, cities, life stages… and the pattern was remarkably consistent. Women saved. Women managed household budgets with discipline. But investing — putting money to work with real autonomy felt like it belonged to someone else. Either a husband, a father, or eventually even a son.
And finally, it was the data which gave it urgency. Inflation in India has historically outpaced the returns on the instruments women were being steered toward — fixed deposits, post office schemes, physical gold. A woman who saves diligently in those instruments isn’t building wealth. She is actually losing ground in real terms. That’s not a conservative strategy but an expensive one. The book exists because that truth needed saying plainly, without jargon and without apology.
The Capitalyst: The book ‘The Indian Woman’s Essential Guide to Investing and Building Wealth by Sumaira Abidi‘ positions you simultaneously as a journalist, a practitioner at India’s largest fund house, and a woman who has navigated the same financial landscape you write about. How did you manage the tension between speaking from authority and speaking from vulnerability, and which voice do you think the reader most needs to hear?
Sumaira Abidi: The tension was real, and I sat with it for a long time. The journalist in me wanted to cite data and present evidence. The practitioner in me wanted to give clear, actionable guidance. The woman in me wanted to say: I have made the mistakes I’m warning you about, and here’s what they cost me. What I arrived at is that authority and vulnerability aren’t opposing forces. Authority builds credibility; vulnerability builds trust. And you need both. Readers don’t act on financial advice from people they don’t trust and they don’t trust people who present themselves as having always known better.
The Capitalyst: In 2022 you were appointed Vice President of Investor Connect at SBI Mutual Fund, moving from journalism into the industry you had spent a decade covering. The journalist who becomes a practitioner is often seen as having crossed a line. How did you navigate that perception, and what does the institutional role give you that journalism could not?
Sumaira Abidi: What the institutional role at SBI Mutual Fund gave me was something journalism simply can’t: proximity to the practical side of what I’d spent years describing. I could meet investors directly, understand their hesitations firsthand, see where education actually broke down and why a first-generation investor in a smaller city wasn’t taking that first step. That ground-level understanding changed how I think about financial communication entirely. Journalism is a flashlight. An institutional role in investor education, done well, is infrastructure. At a certain point, I wanted to help build infrastructure.
The Capitalyst: In 2020 you were named on AIWMI’s Top 100 Women in Finance list, having arrived at that recognition through journalism rather than a conventional finance career. What does the journalism background give you in a room full of fund managers and wealth managers that their training does not — and where does it put you at a disadvantage?
Sumaira Abidi: I can only speak from where I personally started. When I joined CNBC as an investing novice, I knew what I didn’t know. And I had a hunch that what I didn’t know was probably what other new investors like me didn’t know either. So, I learnt to ask and answer questions that assumed this gap rather than assumed the audience had already filled it.
Because the audience for a personal finance show isn’t fund managers. It’s doctors, engineers, homemakers, small business owners, people for whom understanding money isn’t their job, it’s just their life. My job was never to have an academic discussion with them. It was to reach them where they were, and speak in a way that made them feel seen, not talked at. This is perhaps the biggest lesson from my journalism career — finding the right communication strategy.
The disadvantage is real and I won’t pretend otherwise. I don’t have the quantitative depth of someone who’s built and managed portfolios across market cycles. There are rooms where that depth is the price of entry, and I’ve learned to recognise when I’m in one of those rooms and be honest about it. What I bring is communication, not calculation.
The Capitalyst: India’s mutual fund industry has grown dramatically, with SIP registrations reaching record highs and a new generation of first-time investors entering the market through digital platforms. Now that the audience has arrived, what do you think is the next problem? What does this new generation of Indian investors still not understand about wealth building that your book is trying to address?
Sumaira Abidi: The next problem is the gap between participation and understanding. Getting people into the market is a real achievement and one that has taken sustained effort from across the industry and it deserves to be acknowledged as such. But what hasn’t kept pace is preparing investors for what the market will eventually ask of them.
The SIP generation has, for the most part, only ever invested in a rising market. The first serious correction is actually the real test of whether investor education has actually worked or not. And when that moment comes most investors find that they are not prepared to deal with it.
What this generation doesn’t yet understand deeply enough is the relationship between behaviour, time and outcome. They know SIPs are good. What they don’t feel in their bones is why stopping a SIP when markets fall is the single most expensive decision they can make. Rupee cost averaging is counter intuitive. It asks you to stay most committed at exactly the moment you feel least like it. Making that feel true, not just sound true, requires a different kind of financial education.
My book takes this seriously. I wrote it to be useful not just in a bull market where every decision looks wise in hindsight but on the day someone’s portfolio is down and every instinct is telling her to exit.
I say all this as someone who is genuinely invested in this industry – not as a critic standing apart from it. What’s been built over the last decade is remarkable. The work now is making sure investors who’ve come in stay in, and that they do so with understanding, not just hope.
The Capitalyst: You have hosted major industry events across financial services, healthcare, and broader business leadership. Moving across those different industries, what has it taught you about what India’s business culture gets right about ambition, and what it consistently gets wrong?
Sumaira Abidi: India’s business culture gets ambition spectacularly right. The hunger to build, to scale, to create something from nothing is present in almost every room I’ve been in and it’s across sectors, and it’s very infectious.
What it gets wrong more consistently is the relationship between ambition and governance. Speed of growth and quality of structure get treated as trade offs when they really aren’t. The businesses I’ve seen endure are almost always the ones that built carefully as they built fast. The ones that didn’t tend to find out why it mattered, eventually.
The Capitalyst: The book is specifically addressed to Indian women, but the financial literacy gap it describes is not exclusive to women, and the behavioural patterns around money exist in complex ways across Indian households regardless of gender. Did you consider writing a broader book, and what made you commit to the specifically gendered framing even knowing it might limit the audience?
Sumaira Abidi: I considered it seriously. There were months in the writing where I was genuinely wrestling with this. A broader book would have a larger nominal audience. I kept coming back to the belief that it would also have a smaller actual impact.
The financial literacy gap isn’t gender-neutral in its causes, even if its effects are widespread. Men and women arrive at financial disengagement through completely different routes. A man who doesn’t invest usually hasn’t been told that investing isn’t for him. A woman who doesn’t invest very often has been faced this directly or indirectly. Those are different problems. They need different conversations.
The gendered framing isn’t a limitation but a precision instrument. A book that tries to speak to everyone often ends up reaching no one with the force needed to actually change behaviour. The women I was writing for needed to feel, on every page, that this book was written specifically for their situation and their obstacles. That specificity is the whole point. And plenty of men have read it and found it completely applicable to their own lives.
